6 ms·

Forget the hand-waving and excuses, TLS needs to be mandatory, period. This alone would make me forgive just about any other problem with HTTP/2.

Touche 12y ago
Disagree, purely informational websites have no need for TLS.
- x1798DE 12y ago
  The need for TLS is less in purely information websites, but there are a number of problems with this attitude. For one thing, the content of the pages you visit still leaks information about a user, even if the page isn't customized per user. Second, authenticated, trustworthy SSL connections provide MITM protection and prevents modification of the content you receive - the transition from HTTP to HTTPS is generally going to be vulnerable to an sslstrip-like attack, homoglyph attacks, etc, plus content could be modified maliciously in transit directly over an HTTP connection (a less drastic form of this sort of thing has happened many times with ISPs adding in tracking cookies in transit, or comcast adding some javascript to pages when you get close to your bandwidth limit). In any case, the cost of all-TLS is really not so high that you can't enable it just for edge cases who want or need to use secure connections for all internet communication.
- bretthoerner 12y ago
  1) There are regimes that would lock you up (or worse) for looking at some "purely informational" sites. 2) Defaults matter and developers make mistakes. Without required TLS many sites that should be encrypted won't be (they forgot, the site grew into something it didn't used to be, they had no idea what TLS was, etc)
  - Touche 12y ago
    Ruining the web in order to prevent any possibility of bad things happening is something I'm firmly against. I have several small blogs and websites that I absolutely would not bother with if I had to pay for and set up https on each.
- rakoo 12y ago
  On the other hand, what's the problem in using TLS for cases you don't think it useful ? I can see a few reasons here, but I don't see any of them being enough not to use TLS everywhere: - TLS is expensive: my gut says it's wrong, but I'd love to see some numbers. Ilya Grigorik [0] has done some experiments here, and I don't see TLS as really bad - TLS is complicated: true, and we have to rely on tried and tested implementations. I'd say you'd need to do it whatever security we use (and we want security, right?) - TLS requires certificates from the flawed CA infrastructure we have: wrong, public-key authentication isn't even the only authentication scheme possible with TLS, it's just the first one we think about (and also the most tested one). Do you have other counter-arguments ? [0] https://www.igvita.com/2013/12/16/optimizing-nginx-tls-time-to-first-byte https://www.igvita.com/2013/12/16/optimizing-nginx-tls-time-...
  - Touche 12y ago
    Those two reasons are enough to me. The web is supposed to be for everyone. A small restaurant that just has directions and a menu on their website shouldn't have to deal with the headache of setting up HTTPS.
    - x1798DE 12y ago
      If all HTTP connections enforced TLS, how would there be any extra burden?
jsmeaton 12y ago
I disagree for a number of simple reasons. - Cost. You now require every domain owner to also pay for certificates (or get a free one, but the process is roughly the same). - Limited choices. The keys to the kingdom are owned by a few corporate interests. - Encrypted browsing is simply unnecessary for certain classes of sites (non-logon, informational sites). - It increases the barrier for entry to put a basic website up. As well as knowing some html and css, you also need to know about certificates and keys, how to deploy them, and how to keep them safe. - Internal network communication becomes a lot harder with self-signed certificates. You've now got to generate certs and add them to trust stores. Leave the choice to the site operators and the users. Fix the CA system before forcing it upon everyone. I have HAProxy set up as the SSL termination point. It fronts about 15 different applications. But there's no easy way to decrypt at the proxy and then re-encrypt to the backend servers. We're not ready for mandatory SSL.
- bkeroack 12y ago
  > Cost The certificate issue is a browser problem. Self-issued certificates are trivial to produce, and in the era of mandatory TLS they probably should not produce the huge scary browser warnings we see today. I'm not a UI expert, but I could envision a "medium severity" browser warning that states the connection is encrypted but the certificate can't be verified. I don't see the logic behind abandoning encryption entirely rather than tolerate some level of self-signed certificates. > Limited choices. Arguably the whole CA system is in need of serious reform. This is orthogonal to HTTP/2 and TLS. > Encrypted browsing is simply unnecessary for certain classes of sites (non-logon, informational sites). I could not disagree more. Encryption is--from an efficiency standpoint--literally just some bit-twiddling (after key exchange). The efficiency cost is trivial, the social benefits are enormous. It's very much worth it. > It increases the barrier for entry to put a basic website up. This is one advantage of baking it into the protocol. If the HTTP/2 implementation takes care of the details of encryption (including certificate generation if necessary), website authors don't need to be concerned with it. Everything will just work. > Internal network communication becomes a lot harder with self-signed certificates. As stated above, certificates are not barriers. If your network is "trusted", then why would you care if the certificates are self-signed? You are arguing instead to not use encryption at all! Do you see how backward this is?
akerl_ 12y ago
That would be totally valid if the CA industry wasn't so terrible. But given that encryption without authentication and trust is more or less theatre, we need a solid replacement for the current CA scene before mandating TLS is sane.

Touche 12y ago

Disagree, purely informational websites have no need for TLS.

x1798DE 12y ago
The need for TLS is less in purely information websites, but there are a number of problems with this attitude. For one thing, the content of the pages you visit still leaks information about a user, even if the page isn't customized per user. Second, authenticated, trustworthy SSL connections provide MITM protection and prevents modification of the content you receive - the transition from HTTP to HTTPS is generally going to be vulnerable to an sslstrip-like attack, homoglyph attacks, etc, plus content could be modified maliciously in transit directly over an HTTP connection (a less drastic form of this sort of thing has happened many times with ISPs adding in tracking cookies in transit, or comcast adding some javascript to pages when you get close to your bandwidth limit). In any case, the cost of all-TLS is really not so high that you can't enable it just for edge cases who want or need to use secure connections for all internet communication.
bretthoerner 12y ago
1) There are regimes that would lock you up (or worse) for looking at some "purely informational" sites. 2) Defaults matter and developers make mistakes. Without required TLS many sites that should be encrypted won't be (they forgot, the site grew into something it didn't used to be, they had no idea what TLS was, etc)
- Touche 12y ago
  Ruining the web in order to prevent any possibility of bad things happening is something I'm firmly against. I have several small blogs and websites that I absolutely would not bother with if I had to pay for and set up https on each.
rakoo 12y ago
On the other hand, what's the problem in using TLS for cases you don't think it useful ? I can see a few reasons here, but I don't see any of them being enough not to use TLS everywhere: - TLS is expensive: my gut says it's wrong, but I'd love to see some numbers. Ilya Grigorik [0] has done some experiments here, and I don't see TLS as really bad - TLS is complicated: true, and we have to rely on tried and tested implementations. I'd say you'd need to do it whatever security we use (and we want security, right?) - TLS requires certificates from the flawed CA infrastructure we have: wrong, public-key authentication isn't even the only authentication scheme possible with TLS, it's just the first one we think about (and also the most tested one). Do you have other counter-arguments ? [0] https://www.igvita.com/2013/12/16/optimizing-nginx-tls-time-to-first-byte https://www.igvita.com/2013/12/16/optimizing-nginx-tls-time-...
- Touche 12y ago
  Those two reasons are enough to me. The web is supposed to be for everyone. A small restaurant that just has directions and a menu on their website shouldn't have to deal with the headache of setting up HTTPS.
  - x1798DE 12y ago
    If all HTTP connections enforced TLS, how would there be any extra burden?

jsmeaton 12y ago

I disagree for a number of simple reasons. - Cost. You now require every domain owner to also pay for certificates (or get a free one, but the process is roughly the same). - Limited choices. The keys to the kingdom are owned by a few corporate interests. - Encrypted browsing is simply unnecessary for certain classes of sites (non-logon, informational sites). - It increases the barrier for entry to put a basic website up. As well as knowing some html and css, you also need to know about certificates and keys, how to deploy them, and how to keep them safe. - Internal network communication becomes a lot harder with self-signed certificates. You've now got to generate certs and add them to trust stores. Leave the choice to the site operators and the users. Fix the CA system before forcing it upon everyone. I have HAProxy set up as the SSL termination point. It fronts about 15 different applications. But there's no easy way to decrypt at the proxy and then re-encrypt to the backend servers. We're not ready for mandatory SSL.

bkeroack 12y ago
> Cost The certificate issue is a browser problem. Self-issued certificates are trivial to produce, and in the era of mandatory TLS they probably should not produce the huge scary browser warnings we see today. I'm not a UI expert, but I could envision a "medium severity" browser warning that states the connection is encrypted but the certificate can't be verified. I don't see the logic behind abandoning encryption entirely rather than tolerate some level of self-signed certificates. > Limited choices. Arguably the whole CA system is in need of serious reform. This is orthogonal to HTTP/2 and TLS. > Encrypted browsing is simply unnecessary for certain classes of sites (non-logon, informational sites). I could not disagree more. Encryption is--from an efficiency standpoint--literally just some bit-twiddling (after key exchange). The efficiency cost is trivial, the social benefits are enormous. It's very much worth it. > It increases the barrier for entry to put a basic website up. This is one advantage of baking it into the protocol. If the HTTP/2 implementation takes care of the details of encryption (including certificate generation if necessary), website authors don't need to be concerned with it. Everything will just work. > Internal network communication becomes a lot harder with self-signed certificates. As stated above, certificates are not barriers. If your network is "trusted", then why would you care if the certificates are self-signed? You are arguing instead to not use encryption at all! Do you see how backward this is?

akerl_ 12y ago

That would be totally valid if the CA industry wasn't so terrible. But given that encryption without authentication and trust is more or less theatre, we need a solid replacement for the current CA scene before mandating TLS is sane.