6 ms·
There is so much open wifi nowadays that non-https should really start to be considered harmful. A large portion of website visitors are probably connecting via
by diafygi 12y ago
There is so much open wifi nowadays that non-https should really start to be considered harmful. A large portion of website visitors are probably connecting via Starbucks, airport wifi, etc., which means their session cookies are basically public information.
So even given the mass surveillance problems, non-https connections need to start being treated as Bad Practice and discouraged by the sysadmin community.
- api 12y agoAt the very least, regular http should support starttls to allow encryption. That at least requires your attacker to go to the trouble of man in the middle.
- bkeroack 12y agoSTARTTLS mixes concerns in a very bad way and is a horrible hack. Let it die with FTP and SMTP. Really, TLS should just be a mandatory part of the protocol. I haven't read any convincing reason why it isn't, other than vague hand-waving, eg, "we're just a standards body and can't enforce policy".
- 0x0 12y agoFaced with a choice of obtaining a TLS certificate or just going for the old HTTP/1.x protocol, it'd be a hard sell for HTTP/2 for any one-off, quick hack experiment/microsite/internal APIs...
- XorNot 12y agoThe problem is browsers are mostly lousy at giving a good user experience with self-signed certificates. 99% of the time, self-signed doesn't matter except if the certificate changes unexpectedly - i.e. the service just isn't that important. The 1% of sites it does matter for are things like banks and the like, where you need to hammer into users heads that certificates should be valid via other means. Of course, it's casually accepted that it's a-ok for companies to MitM their employees encrypted connections anyway, so I don't really know where that leaves us.
- emhs 12y agoWhat's this about the death of SMTP?
- wmf 12y agoThis is now called opportunistic encryption: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-http2-encryption-03 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-http2-encryption...
- AlyssaRowan 12y agoSTARTTLS has risks over and above pure use of TLS - in particular where it's been used in IMAP and POP3, an attacker injecting plaintext commands before STARTTLS/STLS occurs, tricking an early (plaintext) login and other such shenanigans. This is why the SMTPS port is being resurrected, and STARTTLS-type upgrades are not considered good practice in future - port assignments in future are likely to take that into account.
- peterwwillis 12y agoDevil's Advocate: there is no world wide cabal of wifi hackers trying to steal the Facebook login cookies of starbucks customers. The lack of security is real, but the dangers are overblown.
- nitrogen 12y agoThis particular devil needs no advocate; the risks of coffee shop MITM and dragnet surveillance are too great to ignore.
- diafygi 12y agoCurrently on the front page is an article[1] about Russian malware pen testing for SQL injection. Your attack surface increases dramatically when you have valid session cookies. A good example of this is reddit, that is not https for logged in users with write ability (and thus PostgreSQL write ability). If you have malware that sniffs public wifi traffic for reddit session cookies, you can easily start to test all those write calls for exploits. [1] - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/technology/russian-gang-said-to-amass-more-than-a-billion-stolen-internet-credentials.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/technology/russian-gang-sa...
- woah 12y agoThere isn't?
- hackuser 12y ago> Devil's Advocate: there is no world wide cabal of wifi hackers trying to steal the Facebook login cookies of starbucks customers. The lack of security is real, but the dangers are overblown. Perhaps not, but consider for example that the Starbucks near people with valuable IP (e.g., many Starbucks in Silicon Valley, in NYC, in Washington DC, in Redmond WA, in Cambridge MA, in Beverly Hills, in the Hamptons, etc.) would be valuable targets.
- peterwwillis 12y agoA valuable target will always get hacked because they'll be specifically targeted. For most of them it'll be from spearphishing, but there's a multitude of ways to attack people even if https is the default. All well known celebrity hacks are done either by spearphishing or breaking into an account independent of contact with the person. And in general it's probably not a good idea to set world-wide standards on the most used high level protocol in the world based on a few rich people who use the net from an unsecure device.
- makmanalp 12y agoI completely agree, but what of the trouble of getting certificates? I have a hard time figuring out who to trust - the cheaper providers seem scammy and the expensive ones seem to be charging a lot. Self signed certs issue a big fat warning that deters users.
- nmjohn 12y agoThe cheaper ones aren't scammy - quite frankly it is the expensive ones that are the scammy ones! I have used cheapssl.com (now ssls.com) for a number of years, probably a total of 20 sites, without a single issue. That being said, namecheap or gandi.net also both offer reasonable priced certs. Just so you are aware, if you think the $1,000,000 insurance policy offered with the more expensive providers is worth _anything_, be sure to read the fine print first. The only potential more expensive thing of value is buying an EV cert to get the green URL bar - not that it actually provides even a little bit more protection, it doesn't - but because users see them and have been conditioned to immediately associate it with trust.
- lazyloop 12y agoFor this to work we need free certificates. Many still keep referring to StartSSL, but there you just pay double later on in revocation fees. https://www.startssl.com/?app=43 https://www.startssl.com/?app=43
- duaneb 12y agoNo, I don't think we need free certificates, I think we need people who can carefully evaluate an untrusted certificate and make their own decision. The whole idea of a CA is pretty broken at current scale. Meanwhile, self-signed certificates are seen as a red flag. Should they be?
- johnny22 12y agothat sounds less possible than free certificates.
- nitrogen 12y agoOpportunistic encryption of all sessions doesn't require any certificates. All that's needed is a key exchange algorithm and browser support. The UI would make it clear when a certificate was presented and validated, but no cert is needed for unauthenticated encrypted connections. The next step up from that would be unsigned public keys with pinning (like ssh) to reduce MITM, and finally above that would be identity verification on the level of https.
- kaoD 12y ago> but no cert is needed for unauthenticated encrypted connections That is a common misconception. If I MITM when you establish connection, how would you notice? My self-signed certificate looks like a real one. That's why we need CAs (or WoT, or whatever), to verify identity after we've established a secure channel.
- nitrogen 12y agoRead my final paragraph. You don't have to care about MITM to benefit from opportunistic encryption.
- fiatjaf 12y agoWell, websites that don't use sessions or cookies can still work harmlessly, right?
- sjwright 12y agoIf only it were that simple. As it stands now, the problem with HTTP/HTTPS is that encryption is an all-or-nothing proposition. There should be three modes supported: 1. Unencrypted (for casual/ad-hoc web servers serving cache-able static assets) 2. Encrypted-untrusted (for casual/ad-hoc web servers that just want to thwart basic Wi-Fi cookie sniffing) 3. Encrypted-trusted (for most established websites) Right now, #2 isn't a viable option, because HTTPS servers with self-signed certificates are correctly treated as dangerous. A URL that designates the HTTPS protocol must always require a trusted connection. The solution is (relatively) simple: HTTP 2.0 should allow encrypted-untrusted connections for URLs designated with the HTTP protocol.
- lucaspiller 12y agoIs encrypted-untrusted really a good idea? MITM attacks over wifi are nearly as easy as cookie sniffing. What sort of sites would fit into this category?
- AlyssaRowan 12y agoAbsolutely everywhere you use HTTP now. It's never worse than plaintext, and it's an effective replacement for it. Encrypted-untrusted prevents mass passive surveillance, and requires it to be active MITM. And - as I've pointed out on the TLS WG list a few times - if an attacker can't tell you're being opportunistic, they might not be willing to risk being detected. We can make them take that risk by reducing the visible distinguishers there.
- lucaspiller 12y agoSorry, maybe I wasn't clear... With encrypted-trusted if you try an MITM, unless you have a valid SSL key, the browser will show a big error screen and not send any cookies. With encrypted-untrusted the browser wouldn't do that, so the cookies would still be sent. You don't even need to route the connection, you could just present an "Error connection to server" page and most users would just think the wifi isn't working. My question is given that what is the purpose of encrypted-untrusted? It's no more secure than HTTP for anything that uses session cookies or the like. Sure the connection is encrypted, but then all you are doing is stopping people seeing that you are accessing My Little Pony shows on YouTube. If it's a public hotspot at the coffee shop, they can probably see you watching it (IRL) anyway. Given the connection is untrusted, it wouldn't be hard for the NSA to do a MITM attack at the ISP level.
- lazyloop 12y agoOne aspect of this many seem to forget is HTTP as a backend protocol, you will have to set up certificates and keep them up to date there too.