6 ms·

> It may cost a bit more to run a fully secure CA, and that would be reflected in the cost of a certificate from those that remain, but that'd be a price that e

by gtaylor 12y ago

> It may cost a bit more to run a fully secure CA, and that would be reflected in the cost of a certificate from those that remain, but that'd be a price that everyone should be willing to pay. I don't know, this could really discourage the adoption of HTTPS. We need to be making it easier for sites to adopt it. Ideally we could lessen our dependence on CAs. Sure, a "fully secure/expensive" CA would validate a certificate's authenticity with high confidence, but we'd be excluding tons of hobby projects and small shops who wouldn't want that expense.

michaelt 12y ago
Seems to me a CA that can't avoid issuing bad certificates is a bad thing for security, no matter how cheap they are.
marcosdumay 12y ago
What good does widespread HTTPS use do if you can not trust it? I'm all for reducing our dependence on CAs, and, reducing the number of CAs we trust for signing a site, like putting the keys in DNSSEC. But until we do that, we must not trust bad apples.
- AlyssaRowan 12y ago
  It's always better than plaintext HTTP. Nothing is worse than plaintext. TLSv1.2 with good ciphersuites using ECDHE with a named curve like secp256r1 [murky origins I know, but we know of nothing else wrong with it, though Curve25519 is superior in my opinion], and an AEAD like AES-128-GCM or CHACHA20-POLY1305, properly implemented with no TLS compression at least comprehensively prevents Eve from spying on the contents of your connection in most cases, even if you're using self-signed certificates with no pinning and are entirely unprotected from Mallory. A browser shouldn't call it secure or the endpoint trusted, but it should transparently replace all uses of unencrypted HTTP worldwide, including internal ones. That should not be discouraged, and will hopefully be actioned with HTTP/2 - that was the plan, anyway. Even if the encryption is crap (Export ciphers... RC4?) I guess it does take some more work for Eve, which knocks out a few of the lower-capability adversaries.
  - leni536 12y ago
    Couldn't Mallory just replace the certificate with her own one? The browser would just pop up the same warning. The warning should show some form of a public key fingerprint at least before clicking through "I understand the risk".

by gtaylor 12y ago

michaelt 12y ago

Seems to me a CA that can't avoid issuing bad certificates is a bad thing for security, no matter how cheap they are.

marcosdumay 12y ago

What good does widespread HTTPS use do if you can not trust it? I'm all for reducing our dependence on CAs, and, reducing the number of CAs we trust for signing a site, like putting the keys in DNSSEC. But until we do that, we must not trust bad apples.

AlyssaRowan 12y ago
It's always better than plaintext HTTP. Nothing is worse than plaintext. TLSv1.2 with good ciphersuites using ECDHE with a named curve like secp256r1 [murky origins I know, but we know of nothing else wrong with it, though Curve25519 is superior in my opinion], and an AEAD like AES-128-GCM or CHACHA20-POLY1305, properly implemented with no TLS compression at least comprehensively prevents Eve from spying on the contents of your connection in most cases, even if you're using self-signed certificates with no pinning and are entirely unprotected from Mallory. A browser shouldn't call it secure or the endpoint trusted, but it should transparently replace all uses of unencrypted HTTP worldwide, including internal ones. That should not be discouraged, and will hopefully be actioned with HTTP/2 - that was the plan, anyway. Even if the encryption is crap (Export ciphers... RC4?) I guess it does take some more work for Eve, which knocks out a few of the lower-capability adversaries.
- leni536 12y ago
  Couldn't Mallory just replace the certificate with her own one? The browser would just pop up the same warning. The warning should show some form of a public key fingerprint at least before clicking through "I understand the risk".