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Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web

• darka 12y ago
  How does this compare to StartSSL?
  • blibble 12y ago
    maybe they won't try to extort you if you require a revocation? (StartSSL do even for paying customers... stay away)
• iancarroll 12y ago
  Very interesting, it looks like they're working with IdenTrust on this. I wonder if it supports wildcard certs. Like StartCom selling Class 2/3, running a CA is very expensive and I wonder how they plan on recouping the fees for this.
  • shawabawa3 12y ago
    > running a CA is very expensive and I wonder how they plan on recouping the fees for this Is it? Seems like it should be dirt cheap to me. It's basically just an API for generating and revoking certs.
    • iancarroll 12y ago
      WebTrust audits are the bulk of the cost. We got quoted $150k for our first audit. This is a yearly thing too. You also have to pay for your own cage in a datacenter, the HSM, validation staff, etc...
• lowglow 12y ago
  Free CA? This is cool. Why this wasn't done a long time ago is beyond me. (Also please support wildcard certs) An interesting thing happened at a meet-up at Square last year. Someone from google's security team came out and demonstrated what google does to notify a user that a page has been compromised or is a known malicious attack site. During the presentation she was chatting about how people don't really pay attention to the certificate problems a site has, and how they were trying to change that through alerts/notifications. After which someone asked that if google cared so much about security why didn't they just become a CA and sign certs for everyone. She didn't answer the question, so I'm not sure if that means they don't want to, or they are planning to. What privacy concerns should we have if someone like goog were to sign the certs? What happens if a CA is compromised?
  • ithkuil 12y ago
    > Free CA? This is cool. Why this wasn't done a long time ago is beyond me. (Also please support wildcard certs) There have been previous attempts, e.g. http://www.cacert.org/ http://www.cacert.org/ AFAIK they failed in the politics front (getting accepted in mainstream browsers). Sounds like EFF might have better leverage.
  • mike_hearn 12y ago
    It wasn't done a long time ago because running a CA costs money (which is why they charge for certificates), so whoever signs up to run one is signing up for a money sink with no prospect of direct ROI, potentially for a loooooong time. This new CA is to be run by a non-profit that uses corporate sponsorship rather than being supported by the market; whether that's actually a better model in the long run is I suppose an open question. But lots of other bits of internet infrastructure are funded this way, so perhaps it's no big deal. There aren't a whole lot of privacy concerns with CA's as long as you use OCSP stapling, so users browsers aren't hitting up the CA each time they visit a website (Chrome never does this but other browsers can do). Re: CA compromise. One reason running a CA costs money is that the root store policies imposed by the CA/Browser Forum require (I think!) the usage of a hardware security module which holds the signing keys. This means a compromised CA could issue a bunch of certs for as long as the compromise is active, but in theory it should be hard or impossible to steal the key. Once the hackers are booted out of the CA's network, it goes back to being secure. Of course quite some damage can be done during this time, and that's what things like Certificate Transparency are meant to mediate - they let everyone see what CAs are doing.
    • hdra 12y ago
      I'm curious. Whats the biggest cost in running a CA? As in, what makes those certs so expensive?
      • iancarroll 12y ago
        Your mileage may vary, but the biggest upfront cost is the WebTrust audit. Certly got quoted $150k for a reasonable root and its subordinates. This is a yearly cost. HSMs are not cheap either, plus you have to host them securely, hire validation staff, etc...
• sschueller 12y ago
  A little vague on details. Apache only or also Nginx? Who is the CA? No way I am running something like this on a production machine. I like the idea but I would rather have the client just output the certificate and key in a dir so I can put the files where I need them and I can configure the changes to my webserver. Also this does not solve the issue of a CA issuing certificates for your domain and doing MITM.
  • pde3 12y ago
    This is just a pre-announcement to let folks (OSes, hosting providers, other platforms) plan and do integration work. Per our own warnings, we definitely don't want this running on production machines until it launches in 2015. Our Apache code is a developer preview, we'll be working on Nginx next. ISRG will be operating a new root CA for this project. Although if you think that your choice of CA makes you more or less secure, you may not have understood how PKIX works -- you can buy a cert from whichever CA you like, but your adversary can always pick the weakest one to try to impersonate you.
    • mike_hearn 12y ago
      > ISRG will be operating a new root CA for this project. Are you going to be cross-signed by IdenTrust or something? If you're really going to try and create a new root CA from scratch, surely you will be impaled on the spike of low coverage for many years?
      • schoen 12y ago
        That's quite a painful spike indeed, but fortunately we'll be cross-signed by IdenTrust.
    • trothamel 12y ago
      "ISRG will be operating a new root CA for this project." Does that mean every client/browser will need to be updated to include the new CA? Or will it somehow be signed by other (competing) CAs? I like the idea of this project, and I think it's a great thing for the Internet - I just worry that it will take a long time for it to be usable in practice.
• fsiefken 12y ago
  Will these certificates work with Internet Explorer and Chrome?
  • danielweber 12y ago
    You can add your own CA to browsers.
    • Someone1234 12y ago
      You can and I can but 99.999% of normal users cannot and will not.
  • schoen 12y ago
    Yes. This CA will be cross-signed.
• Aardwolf 12y ago
  My website only contains publically available stuff for people to read. Is there any reason why I would want to use https for this use case? Or what does "entire web" mean?
  • aw3c2 12y ago
    Yes, because it is no one's business what people are looking at anyways. If you have more than one URL, HTTPS will hide that. HTTPS will also make an attacker unable to change your content.
  • hughes 12y ago
    Only with https could you be sure that your visitors are viewing the exact information you published, and that the content has not been hijacked. Over http it could conceivably have malicious or tracking content introduced without your knowledge.
  • pencilcode 12y ago
    People could think they are reading an article from your site but actually they're not or the text was tampered with. With https you ensure people are actually reading what you published.
  • eyeface 12y ago
    Sure! If I trust your site but not my ISP, then https allows me to trust the connection between us. That means that nobody can tamper with the content and inject some malicious JS. Also, the ISP could only tell that I am talking to your server, and not anything beyond that.
  • overshard 12y ago
    If you're not using HTTPS it is trivial for anyone in the middle of the "client to server and back" connection to change any of the content. If you use HTTPS you prevent alterations to that traffic and people receive exactly what you expect they should receive. Examples of recent ISP misbehaving on non-https websites just 25 days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8500131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8500131 Note that the Verizon issue isn't anything entirely content altering but someone who lives in a country with strict monitoring of traffic could easily change the wording of your website to match their propaganda if you aren't using HTTPS. So yes, your content is publicly available free stuff and no one is probably sending you user login credentials or credit cards but it still matters.
• tacojuan 12y ago
  Wow, I had a goofy idea a few months ago that one day we could have some sort of non-profit/charity that just runs a free, as in beer and freedom, "common good" CA. Looks neat.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• overshard 12y ago
  The "How It Works" page, https://letsencrypt.org/howitworks/ https://letsencrypt.org/howitworks/, has me a bit worried. Anytime I see a __magic__ solution that has you running a single command to solve all your problems I immediately become suspicious at how much thought went into the actual issue. If I'm running a single web app on a single Ubuntu server using Apache then I'm set! If I'm running multiple web apps across multiple servers using a load balancer, nginx on FreeBSD then... All the same I'm really looking forward to this coming out, it can be nothing but good that all of these companies are backing this new solution and I'm sure it'll expand and handle these issues as long as a good team is behind it.
  • general_failure 12y ago
    I don't get why they are releasing a command line, instead of just giving us a cert that we can install by ourselves.
    • erickt 12y ago
      That wouldn't be safe, because then they would have access to your private key and impersonate you. Having you (indirectly via their script) generate the key and submit the public key for signing means your private key never leaves the premises.
      • jackalope 12y ago
        There is no reason for the CA to ever see the private key. All they need is a CSR. This approach is fundamentally broken.
    • acveilleux 12y ago
      The tool will gather the domains, use the CA API to validate ownership, obtain the certs (which cannot be unilaterally created since they are based on a public/private key pair) and manage their expiry. That's a bit more then "giving us a cert"
    • schoen 12y ago
      It's primarily because of the interactive challenge to prove that you control the domains you're requesting the cert for. If you want, the client can just give you the cert at the end instead of installing it. In the common case for a user who's not currently comfortable with the process, the client is automating several things -- generating a private key and CSR, proving control of the domain, and installing the key and cert in the server.
• jgrahamc 12y ago
  Can wait until summer 2015 for a free cert? CloudFlare offers Universal SSL: https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl
  • Someone1234 12y ago
    For Cloudflare customers...
  • lawl 12y ago
    That allows cloudflare to read any traffic because you SSL to cloudflare and auth their private key...
  • grey-area 12y ago
    That's not really a comparable solution, it requires giving up control of the domain.
  • pde3 12y ago
    Those free certs will encrypt from the browser to CloudFlare's CDN. You still need to do something to encrypt from CloudFlare to the publishing webserver. Self-signing can work for that hop, though Let's Encrypt may wind up being smoother for sys admins. We've been working with CloudFlare to drive HTTPS adoption, and plan to work with them further on integration.
• Karunamon 12y ago
  This is awesome! It looks like what CACert.org set out to be, except this time instead of developing the CA first and then seeking certification (which has been a problem due to the insanely expensive audit process), but the EFF got the vendors on board first and then started doing the nuts and bolts. This is huge if it takes off. The CA PKI will no longer be a scam anymore!! I'd trust the EFF/Mozilla over a random for profit "security corporation" like VeriSign any day of the week and twice on Sunday to be good stewards of the infrastructure.
  • tatterdemalion 12y ago
    I don't see how this actually keeps the CA PKI from being a scam. While I personally trust the EFF & Mozilla right now, as long as I can't meaningfully revoke that trust, it's not really trust and the system is still broken.
    • mike_hearn 12y ago
      You can revoke your trust in any CA at any time, you don't even need to see any errors! Just click the little padlock each time you visit a secure website and see if the CA is in your good books. If it's not, pretend the padlock isn't there! OK, that's a little awkward. A browser extension could automate this. But in practice, nobody wants to do this, because hardly anyone has opinions on particular CAs. It's a sort of meta-opinion - some people feel strongly they should be able to feel strongly about CAs, but hardly anyone actually does. So nobody uses such browser extensions.
      • desdiv 12y ago
        Can't you just delete the CA from the browser? On Firefox it's preferences -> advanced -> certificates -> view certificates.
        • tatterdemalion 12y ago
          Yes you can. Obviously, you can choose not to make secure connections with sites certified by a CA you don't trust. But then you just can't use your bank's website anymore, or your search engine, or whatever. Users have a clear stake in whatever informational exchange occurs between them and the websites we access. We should have the authority to participate in determining the terms on which that exchange is secured.
• neals 12y ago
  Finally! Man, is getting and managing certificates a pain in the *ss for our small shop that does a great number of small websites.
• tatterdemalion 12y ago
  This seems like a really great step toward an HTTPS web. It will be an immediately deployable solution that can hopefully TLS encryption normal and expected. However, it doesn't do anything about the very serious problems with the CA system, which is fundamentally unsound because it requires trust and end users do not meaningfully have the authority to revoke that trust. And there's a bigger problem: if EFF's CA becomes the standard CA, there is now another single point of failure for a huge portion of the web. While I personally have a strong faith in the EFF, in the long term I shouldn't have to.
  • orthecreedence 12y ago
    Agreed. For all the hoopla, this is basically just like any other CA (but free). Until we have a truly distributed (namecoin-esque) and accepted CA structure, signed certificates may as well be pipes directly to the NSA. That said, not having to pay some jerk for sending me an email and having me enter a code is really nice. The current CA system is a pitiful excuse for identity verification, and not having to pay for it will be nice.
• digitalsushi 12y ago
  This certificate industry has been such a racket. It's not even tacit that there are two completely separate issues that certificates and encryption solve. They get conflated and non technical users rightly get confused about which thing is trying to solve a problem they aren't sure why they have. The certificate authorities are quite in love that the self-signed certificate errors are turning redder, bolder, and bigger. A self signed certificate warning means "Warning! The admin on the site you're connecting to wants this conversation to be private but it hasn't been proven that he has 200 bucks for us to say he's cool". But so what if he's cool? Yeah I like my banking website to be "cool" but for 200 bucks I can be just as "cool". A few years back the browsers started putting extra bling on the URL bar if the coolness factor was high enough - if a bank pays 10,000 bucks for a really cool verification, they get a giant green pulsating URL badge. And they should, that means someone had to fax over vials of blood with the governor's seal that it's a legitimate institute in that state or province. But my little 200 dollar, not pulsating but still green certificate means "yeah digitalsushi definitely had 200 bucks and a fax machine, or at least was hostmaster@digitalsushi.com for damned sure". And that is good enough for users. No errors? It's legit. What's the difference between me coughing up 200 bucks to make that URL bar green, and then bright red with klaxons cause I didn't cough up the 200 bucks to be sure I am the owner of a personal domain? Like I said, a racket. The certificate authorities love causing a panic. But don't tell me users are any safer just 'cause I had 200 bucks. They're not. The cert is just for warm and fuzzies. The encryption is to keep snoops out. If I made a browser, I would have 200 dollar "hostmaster" verification be some orange, cautious URL bar - "this person has a site that we have verified to the laziest extent possible without getting sued for not even doing anything at all". But then I probably wouldn't be getting any tips in my jar from the CAs at the end of the day.
  • tatterdemalion 12y ago
    The warning pages are really ridiculous. Why doesn't every HTTP page show a warning you have to click through? But it's not like MITM attacks are not real. CAs don't realistically do a thing about them, but it is true that you can't trust that your connection is private based on TLS alone. (unless you're doing certificate pinning or you have some other solution).
• general_failure 12y ago
  I hope they do wildcard certs as well.
• peterwwillis 12y ago
  Two things: 1. I really hope this is hosted in a non-FVEY territory. 2. Why can't we set a date (say, 5 years?) when all browsers default to https, or some other encrypted protocol, and force you to type "http://" http://" to access old, unencrypted servers?
• mangeletti 12y ago
  So, one CA to rule then all? There's a scenario (simplified for illustration, but entirely possible) that's normally not a huge risk because there are many CAs, and they are private, for-profit companies that have an economic incentive to protect you and your certificate's ability to assure end users that a conversation's privacy won't be compromised. 1) browser requests site via SSL 2) MITM says, "let's chat - here's my cert" 3) browser asks, "is this cert legit for this domain?" 4) MITM says, "yes, CA gave us this, because of FISA, to give to you as proof" 5) browser says, "ok, let's chat" I'm not trying to spread FUD, but if you're NSA and you've been asking CAs for their master keys for years, doesn't a single CA sound great (free and easy == market consolidation), and doesn't EFF seem like the perfect vector for a Trojan horse like this, given its popularity and trust among hacker types gained in recent years?
  • geofft 12y ago
    I'm not sure I follow that line of reasoning. Each CA is independently and completely able to issue certificates (not counting EV, but let's leave that out). There are hundreds of CAs. Depending on your trust store, some of them are literally owned by the US Department of Defense. Others are owned by the Chinese government. How does having _fewer_ CAs make anything easier? Why is the EFF a better route than any of the various other companies that have gotten themselves in the CA program? And given that all the CAs are equivalently trusted at a technical level, why does the human trust afforded the EFF affect whether it's a better target?
  • schoen 12y ago
    We will look for ways to mitigate the risk of misissuing for any reason, including because someone tries to coerce us to misissue. One approach to this that's interesting is Certificate Transparency. http://www.certificate-transparency.org/ http://www.certificate-transparency.org/ There's also HPKP, TACK, and DANE, plus the prospect of having more distributed cert scans producing databases of all the publicly visible certs that people are encountering on the web.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
• tmmm 12y ago
  Won't people need to have LetsEncrypt CA certificate installed on their computers to not get that red SSL incorrect certificate thing? Other than that, this is awesome.
  • jolan 12y ago
    The "How It Works" page (https://letsencrypt.org/howitworks/ https://letsencrypt.org/howitworks/) says: - Obtain a browser-trusted certificate and set it up on your web serve IdenTrust is listed as a sponsor and is the CA for the letsencrypt.org certificate so I'm guessing they're doing some sort of partnership.
    • tmmm 12y ago
      I mean ordinary people who will visit the page.
      • abritishguy 12y ago
        "browser-trusted certificate" < it is already trusted by them
  • joshmoz 12y ago
    IdenTrust will be cross-signing our roots while we apply to root programs.
    • diafygi 12y ago
      Thanks for the clarification! You might want to add that point to your technical how-it-works section[1]. I was wondering how older browsers would accept a new CA's signature. Also, I really wish AOL would have donated their root certs to y'all[2] so you didn't have to set up a whole new CA. [1]: https://letsencrypt.org/howitworks/technology/ https://letsencrypt.org/howitworks/technology/ [2]: https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000618.html https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000618....
• eyeareque 12y ago
  This is great news, but I am wondering how they will handle revoking certificates. For example: Do we really want malware sites popping up with valid Ssl certificates?
  • BogdanCalin 12y ago
    You can revoke the certificates from the command line. It's shown at the end of the video.
    • eyeareque 12y ago
      Ah, so there aren't plans to add this CA into web browsers. That makes more sense.
  • jstanley 12y ago
    Why not? If you own the domain you can get a DV cert, whether you use the domain for malicious purposes or not. The certificate isn't saying "this website won't infect your computer", it's saying "you're talking to the real owner of this domain".
• vbezhenar 12y ago
  We have DNS system in place which should be enough to establish trust between browser and SSL public key. E.g. site could store self-signed certificate fingerprint in the DNS record and browser should be fine with that. If DNS system is spoofed, user will be in bad place anyway so DNS system must be secured in any case.
  • spindritf 12y ago
    No. A proper certificate protects against malicious DNS resolver. What you're talking about is being introduced alongside DNSSEC, and it's called DANE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Named_Entities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na...
• zobzu 12y ago
  Whos auditing the ca?
  • psykovsky 12y ago
    Who's auditing the CA's currently trusted by your browser?
    • zobzu 12y ago
      various 3rd parties. this is required by the cab forum which my browser requires as well. inform yourself if you want to write stuff like that. even more, its sad that people think CAs have zero checking and just give what, money to browsers to be included? Thanksfully its not like that yet.
      • psykovsky 12y ago
        So,if you knew the answer to your own question, why did you ask?
        • zobzu 12y ago
          I did not, actually. Same subject, but the question is different since this is a CA signed by a CA in this case.
  • schoen 12y ago
    We intend to have a WebTrust audit, just like other CAs do.
    • zobzu 12y ago
      thanks!
  • themartorana 12y ago
    Who's auditing the auditors? Remember Moody's? It's not entirely analogous, but it's not far from it. At some point down the chain, you have to rely on trust to some degree. Either disappear in to the wilderness and completely disconnect from the grid or - at some point - you have to trust someone.
• mangeletti 12y ago
  One possible solution is a BitCoin-like block chain of certificate proof, so that a website's certificate can be verified against the domain without a central authority.
  • fragsworth 12y ago
    That doesn't even remotely work, who has the private keys to authorize the certificates?
    • mangeletti 12y ago
      What authorization is required in this scenario? I'm talking about a novel idea here, one that doesn't fit into the existing CA model. There would be no CA in this scenario; verification would be decentralized, based on shared information, not on knowledge of a secret.
      • akerl_ 12y ago
        I'm not sure web-of-trust can be considered a novel idea in 2014. We can all look at the variety of web-of-trust methods to see how well that's taken off amongst internet users.
        • mangeletti 12y ago
          It is novel, in terms of there being any such service in existence, ever.
    • itistoday2 12y ago
      So, blockchain solutions do work, and here is how: https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain You can replace all CAs with a single blockchain. And we should do this, because this Let's Encrypt CA, while a great step forward, is still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, explained in this video: https://vimeo.com/100433057 https://vimeo.com/100433057
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• mattste 12y ago
  I'm so excited for this. I know both the people working on the team from the University of Michigan, and both are extremely smart people passionate about web encryption.
• xs 12y ago
  While this is nice and I'm happy to see such a product coming, I still don't see a free TLS solution for my smaller projects. Heroku will still charge me $20/mo for TLS even if I have my certificate. Cloudflare will also want to charge me to inspect TLS. I could drop both and get a Linode but then that costs too and is a pain to setup a server myself.
• spindritf 12y ago
  ACME sounds great. Copying codes from emails is suboptimal at best. Free certificate from command line and free revocation from the same client sound even better. I just don't know about the automatic configuration tool. Like webpanels for managing a server, it has never worked for me.
• sbierwagen 12y ago
  Uh oh, this looks like it kills sslmate.com Sorry agwa.
• teamhappy 12y ago
  I couldn't be happier about the news, the EFF and Mozilla always had a special place in my heart. However, the fact that we have to wait for our free certificates until the accompanying command line tool is ready for prime time seems unnecessary. Another thing I'm interested in is whether they provide advanced features like wildcard certificates. This is usually the kind of thing CA's charge somewhat significant amounts of money for.
  • iancarroll 12y ago
    I doubt the actual CA has been setup either. They're setting up their own root while cross signing from IdenTrust, that's not a one day activity. Auditors have to be present, software has to be designed and tested, etc.
    • teamhappy 12y ago
      It's true that this shouldn't be done in a day, but it's trivial compared to building a command line tool that automatically configures HTTP servers and designing an open protocol that issues and renews certificates. This is especially true if one of your partners is a CA. --- Let me be clear here: I'm not complaining that I don't get my free cake now. I do think however that most people at the EFF and Mozilla would agree that we needed something like this a couple of years ago. In that context I think it's a least noteworthy that they decided to wait until other parts of the system are ready.
      • barnaby 12y ago
        :-) It's technically easier but organizationally more difficult and time consuming.
  • schoen 12y ago
    The thing that's causing the delay is not the client software development, it's the need to create the CA infrastructure and then perform a WebTrust audit. If we were ready on the CA side to begin issuing certificates today, we would be issuing them today.
• balabaster 12y ago
  How does a CA that's formed by a conglomerate of U.S. companies (under the jurisdiction of the NSA) make us any safer than we are currently? It doesn't. The chain of trust chains up all the way to a U.S. company, which can be coerced into giving up the certificate and compromising the security of the entire chain. I'm on the side of the EFF trying to encrypt the web, but this is not the solution.
  • anonbanker 12y ago
    truth be told, it doesn't make anyone safer. it's a big fat placebo, especially once the NSA realizes that this project is entirely under their jurisdiction. Now, if there was a project in Iceland or Seychelles that was doing something similar, I would be much more apt to participate.
    • balabaster 12y ago
      Security theatre for the win(?) Do these people [EFF] not realize that the people they're trying to win over are network nerds? These are people that actually understand this shit and the repercussions of it. I can't profess to understanding all the details of encryption infrastructure, but I learned very quickly in kindergarten, you can't trust anyone you don't know. It doesn't matter who they are, who they know or what they know. Half the time, you can't even trust "cold hard facts", the facts are frequently misinterpreted, fabricated or eventually proven to be wrong - once it was a fact that the earth was flat, then we were the centre of the universe, now the universe as we know it is held together by a God particle. Science claims facts that invalidate there being a God... all facts are a matter of our fallable understanding of this scientific instrument we are building. Even people you do trust can be coerced into doing things that compromise your ability to trust them or their motives. If you want to automate trust, then you're eventually going to have to realize that you can't. All you can do is mitigate the cost of being wrong. Absolute power corrupts absolutely - the CA (or whoever controls that CA) has absolute power in this scenario. If you have the director's family hostage, everyone else's security just went down the pan. Chain of trust is like putting all your eggs in one basket. You just don't do it. Web of trust is a marginal step up, but it's more of a pain in the ass and can also be overcome by a group with malicious intent.
• xxdesmus 12y ago
  Who will handle abuse complaints and revocations of known bad actors? I'd be curious to see who's abuse department will be handling those issues.
  • belorn 12y ago
    What kind of abuse where you thinking about? If the domain is hijacked, you simply repossess the domain and request a new certificate and the old one is revoked.
    • xxdesmus 12y ago
      As in, revoking a cert for a known C&C box, or a confirmed spammer, confirmed box serving an exploitkit, confirmed phishing domain (such as my-apple-ikloud-verify.foo) Basically, my assumption is they won't want to be providing certs to known bad actors. So I'm curious who is going to own the abuse handling for the CA.
      • duskwuff 12y ago
        Is that really something a SSL CA should be responsible for? I'd argue it isn't. An SSL certificate is proof of identity (and even that only in a very limited sense), not of legitimacy.
      • belorn 12y ago
        Those issues are in theory handled by taking down the people who commits it, and in practice by taking down the domain names, since those normally has been registered using false credentials. One can hope/assume that this system will automatically revoke domains that expire or get removed.
      • Dylan16807 12y ago
        No reason bad actors can't be encrypted on the wire just like all the other actors.
• mike-cardwell 12y ago
  Glad I don't work for a CA right now.
• mike-cardwell 12y ago
  I'm hoping that one day soon, I'll be able to remove this line from my nginx config: ssl_certificate /path/to/file.crt; My web server will notice that I want SSL, but haven't specified a path to a cert. It will then go off and generate one and get it signed automatically using an API like the one being discussed. It will also handle renewing automatically when the time comes.
  • TillE 12y ago
    Automatic unconfigured behavior is bad, but something like a ssl_certificate_auto directive that's in the default config would make a lot of sense.
• jfindley 12y ago
  It would be nice to have support for ECDSA certificates. I've not found a CA yet who'll provide one of these, despite the fact that many clients to already support them. Unfortunately, after a brief look through client.py I can't see any support for this. Is there any good way of filing an RFE or contributing a patch? ECDSA certs are much cheaper to decrypt, and there's still some places (especially mobile) where TLS is a noticeable overhead - it'd be great to have a CA that provides them.
  • nullc 12y ago
    Hm? The overhead reduction is on the server. Verification IIRC is somewhat slower. There are CAs that issue them, uh... someone managed to get one issued during the TLS WG meeting at IETF last week. I'd have to listen to the audio to find out what CA they used.
  • AlyssaRowan 12y ago
    Indeed, I think that might be viable: it certainly was for CloudFlare! And good ECC certainly is "modern security techniques and best practices". I would however be OK with RSA-2048 using SHA-256, I guess; it's what many other CAs currently use (and this is partially a lowest-denominator problem). Comodo definitely has an ECC root available now, a cross-signed ECDSA root with secp384r1, signing a secp256r1 intermediate. (I had heard there were 3 others deployed out there, although off the top of my head I'm not clear about which they are, perhaps they're also cross-signed?) Why is ECC so poorly deployed in TLS? I've heard indications Certicom had formerly aggressively asserted patents, hence the lack of ECC-supporting CAs; but I don't know which ones. I highly doubt they're still extant, however: many have since expired. Do be aware however that ECDSA can present a huge hazard if the k value needed for every signature is even partially predictable and varies. Officially, it should be random, and very strongly random (even the first two bits being consistently predictable is cumulatively disastrous; using the exact same k to sign two different things is absolutely catastrophic and is how the Sony PS3 root keys were calculated!). If you have a strong PRF for your RNG, you should be fine (e.g. LibreSSL uses ChaCha20); if you want some insurance just in case, you can use a more-auditable and less fragile deterministic process with a strong PRF so the same signature always gets the same, unpredictable k (see RFC 6979), or a combination of the two approaches (e.g. BoringSSL). DSA also had this issue. If you haven't audited your RNG and know it's strong, maybe you should check it before you deploy ECDSA: if your system's headless, its entropy is running on empty and your idea of a mixing function is RC4, it might not be such a hot idea. It'd be fantastic to have the option available to have an ECC root around, and let us have RSA or ECC certs. (Yes, you can cross-sign across algorithms.) Perhaps have ECDSA off by default for a while in light of the above, but it can provide very good performance for people who use modern software and turn it on! I'd suggest using secp256r1 (aka NIST P-256). It's already deployed and 256-bit curves lie at about RSA-3072 strength (stronger than most deployed CAs now, which typically use RSA-2048). A few others have deployed secp384r1, but that was following the NSA's Suite B lead; I'm not sold on that being relevant at all. secp256r1 is also fairly fast, with some very well-optimised constant-time routines available in OpenSSL if you enable a flag or even faster ones if you're using 1.2 beta (expect something like a 200%-250% performance boost over the generic elliptic curve routines); it's not quite Curve25519 speed, but it isn't bad. I do however acknowledge the extreme murkiness surrounding the generation of the NIST/SECG/X9.62 curves. That does present some concern to me. I tried to get to the bottom of that (see my posts on CFRG) and I can summarise what I found out as basically (now-expired/irrelevant) patent-related shenanigans. I'm not super-comfortable with that degree of opacity in my curves - however, I also don't know of any actual security problems with secp256r1 (or secp384r1) as they stand, providing they are properly implemented (very big proviso!). I don't think they're backdoored, but make sure you check the hinges on the front door, and I'd prefer a house with better foundations! More transparently-produced curves (such as the Brainpool curves) do exist, but Brainpool is sadly very slow in software (less than half the speed than a good P256 routine, and no scope for optimisations). So looking forward, CFRG (at IRTF) were asked by the TLS Working Group to recommend even better new curves: most probably Curve25519 in my opinion as that seems to admirably satisfy all the criteria for a fast strong mainstream curve, and probably one larger "extra paranoid" curve will be recommended which I really don't know what it'll be at this stage. These hopefully will be/are even faster, strong, and rigidly-explained, without murky origins. And hopefully there will be better algorithms than ECDSA (perhaps a Schnorr-based algorithm such as Ed25519, now the patent expired?). I very much doubt if all the supporting infrastructure for that like HSMs and widely-deployed software support will all be "ready" for this project, however, in the timeframe we'd like, however, so in the meantime, P256 or RSA-2048 I guess is OK. In general: This is absolutely wonderful news. It, and the efficiency of TLS 1.2 (and later, TLS 1.3) will enable people to run TLS everywhere. I am very probably going to use it myself. While the Israel-based CA StartCom do already offer free TLS certificates and I have previously lauded them for that, they pulled an absolutely unforgivable move detrimental to internet security as a whole in refusing to revoke and rekey certificates for free even exceptionally in the immediate wake of Heartbleed (and I do think they should have their CA status reviewed very harshly as a result or revoked, because I do not think that is compliant with CA/B guidelines: they definitely still have live signatures on compromised keys that have not been revoked, which is totally unacceptable). If this initiative means we can replace and dump bad CAs, it's even better news.
• silvenga 12y ago
  Whatever happened to http://www.cacert.org/ http://www.cacert.org/?
  • lingben 12y ago
    is there a reason they don't use it on their own site (https://cacert.org/ https://cacert.org/)?
    • Buge 12y ago
      They do. You just don't have their root installed so it gives an error. You can install their root here http://www.cacert.org/index.php?id=3 http://www.cacert.org/index.php?id=3
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  • acdha 12y ago
    Browser adoption never happened – it's unfortunate but that's a critical barrier to entry for almost anything
• ilaksh 12y ago
  So this means that GoDaddy, Namecheap, Verisign and other sellers/resellers of SSL certificates will need to lower their prices soon, right? Because in a short time many websites won't need to purchase one since they can get it free. Also, have they built this system with a completely scalable distributed architecture? For it to be practical it needs to be performant. Also, does the NSA have access to the core of this system?
  • thuejk 12y ago
    You can already get free certificates from startssl today: https://www.startssl.com/?app=1 https://www.startssl.com/?app=1
    • elijahpaul 12y ago
      Aren't those only for personal (i.e. non commercial) websites?
• steven2012 12y ago
  This is an awesome idea. But I thought the whole idea of a certificate authority is so that we can trust that the CA has vetted the person/site that they have given the certificate to. If all they do is issue certs for free, all we get is encryption, but no identity verification.
  • jrochkind1 12y ago
    With basic certs, the CA just verifies that the entity controls the website the cert is being issued for. The OP explains how Let's Encrypt will do that. (And if they appeared not to be doing that, no software vendors would include the CA in the trust list). With an "Extended Validation" cert, the CA additionally verifies that they are who they say they are on the cert (not just that they control the (web)sites the cert was issued for). I'm not sure if Let's Encrypt plans on issuing EV certs, but if they are, they will have to comply with whatever verification standards are standard, in order for vendors not to revoke them from trusted stores. Same as anyone else.
    • schoen 12y ago
      Further upthread, Josh (one of the other people working on the project) explained that Let's Encrypt currently only has plans to issue DV certs, not EV certs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8624634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8624634 This is because of the automation aspect. EV cert issuance involves a human being looking at offline identity; DV issuance involves proofs of control that can be checked online by a computer, just as existing DV issuance by existing CAs is based on such checks.
• ademarre 12y ago
  This is great news! I'd also like to see a push for technologies like DANE (and necessarily DNSSEC) which address the flawed CA trust model. While we're at it, let's get a non-profit domain registrar going.
  • kayone 12y ago
    > non-profit domain registrar domain squatters are already an issue. imaging if you could register domains for free. I think having to pay $10 for a year is pretty fair. That's one reason I don't mind paying ~$70 for .io domain. it keeps most squatters away.
    • ademarre 12y ago
      You misunderstand. Domains must not be free, and domain cost isn't the problem. Nonprofit registrar != free domains. The problem is the horrible user experience of registrars like Godaddy. I'd rather give my money to a nonprofit that isn't confusing non-technical website owners into buying products they don't need. The registrar landscape is better now with Gandi, but still I'd rather pay a fully transparent nonprofit registrar if one existed.
      • kayone 12y ago
        Sorry, I did misunderstand. Completely agree.
• justcommenting 12y ago
  from the ACME spec, it looks like proof of ownership is provided via[0]: >Put a CA-provided challenge at a specific place on the web server or > Put a CA-provided challenge at a DNS location corresponding to the target domain. Since the server will presumably be plaintext at that point and DNS is UDP, couldn't an attacker like NSA just mitm the proof-of-site-ownership functionality of lets-encrypt to capture ownership at TOFU and then silently re-use it, e.g. via Akamai's infrastructure? [0] https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme-spec/blob/master/draft-barnes-acme.html https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme-spec/blob/master/draft-b...
  • schoen 12y ago
    Four things: (1) You can do the attack you describe today with existing CAs that are issuing DV certs because posting a file on the web server is an existing DV validation method that's in routine use. (2) There is another validation method we've developed called dvsni which is stronger in some respects (but yes, it still trusts DNS). (3) We're expecting to do multipath testing of the proof of site ownership to make MITM attacks harder. (But as with much existing DV in general, someone who can completely compromise DNS can cause misissuance.) (4) If the community finds solutions that make any step of this process stronger, Let's Encrypt will presumably adopt them.
    • justcommenting 12y ago
      agree completely and it's worth noting that i don't have a solution to the issues i mentioned, either. leveraging other (potentially-insecure) paths to establish trust might help further enhance confidence in authenticity; e.g. verification using something like the broad-based strategy of moxie's perspectives (except via plaintext) or maybe through additional verification of plaintext on the site as fetched via tor or retrieving a cached copy of the site securely from the internet archive or search engines. dvsni and multipath testing sound quite interesting, and i think defense in depth is the right approach. having been at akamai's recent edge conference, i didn't hear much from them on this. does anyone have any additional details of their interest in the project?
      • 12y ago
• lambada 12y ago
  Looking at the spec [0] I'm concerned about the section on 'Recovery Tokens'. "A recovery token is a fallback authentication mechanism. In the event that a client loses all other state, including authorized key pairs and key pairs bound to certificates, the client can use the recovery token to prove that it was previously authorized for the identifier in question. This mechanism is necessary because once an ACME server has issued an Authorization Key for a given identifier, that identifier enters a higher-security state, at least with respect the ACME server. That state exists to protect against attacks such as DNS hijacking and router compromise which tend to inherently defeat all forms of Domain Validation. So once a domain has begun using ACME, new DV-only authorization will not be performed without proof of continuity via possession of an Authorized Private Key or potentially a Subject Private Key for that domain." Does that mean, if for instance, someone used an ACME server to issue a certificate for that domain in the past, but then the domain registration expired, and someone else legitimately bought the domain later, they would be unable to use that ACME server for issuing an SSL certificate? [0] https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme-spec/blob/master/draft-barnes-acme.md https://github.com/letsencrypt/acme-spec/blob/master/draft-b...
  • kijin 12y ago
    I suppose they could check WHOIS at a regular interval to check whether a domain secured by one of their certs has expired, and update the state of the ACME server accordingly?
  • schoen 12y ago
    It's possible that this question shouldn't be decided one way or another in the specification, since it will ultimately be more a matter of CA policy about how the CA wants to handle automated issuance and risks.
  • pde3 12y ago
    This is a question about the policy layer of the CA using the ACME protocol. The previous issuing CA should have revoked the cert they issued when the domain was transferred. But a CA speaking the ACME protocol might choose to look at whois and DNS for additional information to decide whether it issues different challenges in response to a certification request.
• king_magic 12y ago
  It's an interesting idea, I'm just not clear on how it works (even when looking at the "How it works" section) - e.g., how do I integrate this with... say, nginx?
  • kevinchen 12y ago
    TLS/SSL certificate setup is a pretty mechanical task. I would imagine their program detects common web servers (nginx, apache, etc), puts the private key somewhere, and points the configuration files at it.
  • shawabawa3 12y ago
    afaik there will be an api to request just the certificate and you'll have to integrate it manually, or a special program which will automatically add it to nginx for you (presumably only for simple setups)
• itistoday2 12y ago
  Kudos to the EFF for making an easy-to-use tool to generate TLS certs! Kudos also for creating the second CA to issue free certificates (the first being StartSSL). The next step needs to be to man-in-the-middle (MITM) proof these certs. We still have to address that problem. We'll be talking about how the blockchain can be used to solve this problem tonight at the SF Bitcoin Meetup, if that interests you, you're welcome to come: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Bitcoin-Social/events/180197882/ http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Bitcoin-Social/events/18... A primer can be found here: https://vimeo.com/100433057 https://vimeo.com/100433057
  • richardwhiuk 12y ago
    The blockchain can't fix this problem - it's too large for most embedded devices, which do matter. It isn't a solution just because it's a 'cool new crypto idea' to every problem on the planet. Just because something uses crypto doesn't mean adding the blockchain to it makes it any better.
    • itistoday2 12y ago
      > The blockchain can't fix this problem - it's too large for most embedded devices That's a wise observation, which is why we are making it accessible to such devices over a MITM-proof connection via DNSChain: https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain https://github.com/okTurtles/dnschain
    • anonymousDan 12y ago
      Hmm, I'm not sure exactly how the parent intends using it, but isn't something like the blockchain (i.e. a publicly auditable log of all changes to certificates) already being proposed for improving the current PKI infrastructure? Also, is the problem you have for embedded devices that they can't afford to download, store, and verify the full bitcoin block-chain? Surely there are compromise solutions that could be made? Not denigrating your comment btw, it's an interesting observation!
• Animats 12y ago
  The EFF has a bad track record in this area. The last time they tried something to identify web sites, it was TRUSTe, a nonprofit set up by the EFF and headed by EFF's director. Then TRUSTe was spun off as a for-profit private company, reduced their standards, stopped publishing enforcement actions, and became a scam operation. The Federal Trade Commission just fined them: "TRUSTe Settles FTC Charges it Deceived Consumers Through Its Privacy Seal Program Company Failed to Conduct Annual Recertifications, Facilitated Misrepresentation as Non-Profit" (http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/11/truste-settles-ftc-charges-it-deceived-consumers-through-its http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/11/truste...) So an EFF-based scheme for a new trusted nonprofit has to be viewed sceptically. This new SSL scheme is mostly security theater. There's no particular reason to encrypt traffic to most web pages. Anyone with access to the connection can tell what site you're talking to. If it's public static content, what is SSL protecting? Unless there's a login mechanism and non-public pages, SSL isn't protecting much. The downside of SSL everywhere is weak SSL everywhere. Cloudflare sells security theater encryption now. All their offerings involve Cloudflare acting as a man-in-the-middle, with everything decrypted at Cloudflare. (Cloudflare's CEO is fighting interception demands in court and in the press, which indicates they get such requests. Cloudflare is honest about what they're doing; the certificates they use say "Cloudflare, Inc.", so they identify themselves as a man-in-the-middle. They're not bad guys.) If you try to encrypt everything, the high-volume cacheable stuff that doesn't need security but does need a big content delivery network (think Flickr) has to be encrypted. So the content-delivery network needs to impersonate the end site and becomes a point of attack. There are known attacks on CDNs; anybody using multi-domain SSL certs with unrelated domains (36,000 Cloudflare sites alone) is vulnerable if any site on the cert can be broken into. If the site's logins go through the same mechanism, security is weaker than if only the important pages were encrypted. You're better off having a small secure site like "secure.example.com" for checkout and payment, preferably with an Extended Validation SSL certificate, a unique IP address, and a dedicated server. There's no reason to encrypt your public product catalog pages. Leave them on "example.com" unencrypted.
  • Carrok 12y ago
    > There's no reason to encrypt your public product catalog pages. Leave them on "example.com" unencrypted. Of course this is true in theory, but in practice, both clients and customers get 'warm fuzzies' from seeing that green lock in the URL window. It let's them 'know' that the company they are dealing with is at least somewhat reputable. Whether this is true or not doesn't matter; it is the perception many people have, and it does affect sales numbers in the real world.
• nodata 12y ago
  And all because people like YOU donated :) Thanks :) btw if you want to donate too, here is the link: https://supporters.eff.org/donate https://supporters.eff.org/donate
• higherpurpose 12y ago
  > Let's Encrypt will be overseen by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), a California public benefit corporation. ISRG will work with Mozilla, Cisco Systems Inc., Akamai, EFF, and others to build the much-needed infrastructure for the project and the 2015 launch What's Cisco's role in this? I'm quite worried about that. It has been reported multiple times that Cisco's routers have NSA backdoors in them, from multiple angles (from TAO intercepting the routers to law enforcement having access to "legal intercept" in them). So I hope they are not securing their certificates with Cisco's routers...
  • drderidder 12y ago
    Yep. Read the product docs on some of their big network routers. You'd be surprised what's in there in terms of port mirroring and what they suggest carriers should use it for.
  • jauer 12y ago
    Lawful Intercept isn't a blanket government back door per se. It's a featureset that allows the operator to configure what is effectively a remote packet capture endpoint. That endpoint is disabled by default and requires operator configuration to be enabled. It just happens that every ISP/telco in the US needs this capability to comply with CALEA so it's manufacturers responding to market forces. Juniper supports it, A Latvian router manufacturer supports it (http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/CALEA http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/CALEA), there's even open source code to do it (https://code.google.com/p/opencalea/ https://code.google.com/p/opencalea/) if you're building your own routers. There's a place to focus your ire over wiretapping. The manufacturers aren't it.
• fixermark 12y ago
  "With a launch scheduled for summer 2015, the Let’s Encrypt CA will automatically issue and manage free certificates for any website that needs them." 'Automatically?' So we're replacing owning people by snooping on their HTTP traffic with owning people by directing them to fake websites digitally signed by "m1crosoft.com"? ... actually, yes, that is kind of an improvement.
• byuu 12y ago
  Here's my current issue with moving to TLS: library support. I do a lot of custom stuff and want to run my own server. I can set up and run the server in maybe 50-100 lines of code, and it works great. I know, I should conform and use Apache/nginx/OpenSSL like everyone else. Because they're so much more secure, right? By using professional code like the aforementioned, you won't get exposed to exploits like Heartbleed, Shellshock, etc. But me, being the stubborn one I am, I want to just code up a site. I can open up a socket, parse a few text lines, and voila. Web server. Now I want to add TLS and what are my options? OpenSSL, crazy API, issues like Heartbleed. libtls from LibreSSL, amazing API, not packaged for anything but OpenBSD yet. Little to no real world testing. Mozilla NSS or GnuTLS, awful APIs, everyone seems to recommend against them. Obscure software I've never heard of: PolarSSL, MatrixSSL. May be good, but I'm uneasy with it since I don't know anything about them. And I have to hope they play nicely with all my environments (Clang on OS X, Visual C++ on Windows, GCC on Linux and BSD) and package managers. Write my own. Hahah. Hahahahahahahahah. Yeah. All I have to do is implement AES, Camellia, DES, RC4, RC5, Triple DES, XTEA, Blowfish, MD5, MD2, MD4, SHA-1, SHA-2, RSA, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), Elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH), Elliptic Curve DSA (ECDSA); and all with absolutely no errors (and this is critical!), and I'm good to go! I'm not saying encryption should be a breeze, but come on. I want this in <socket.h> and available anywhere. I want to be able to ask for socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAMTLS, 0), call setsockcert(certdata, certsize) and be ready to go. Everything we do in computer science is always about raising the bar in terms of complexity. Writing software requires larger and larger teams, and increasingly there's the attitude that "you can't possibly do that yourself, so don't even try." It's in writing operating systems, writing device drivers, writing web browsers, writing crypto software, etc. I didn't get into programming to glue other people's code together. I want to learn how things work and write them myself. For once in this world, I'd love it if we could work on reducing complexity instead of adding to it.
  • IgorPartola 12y ago
    Wow, of all the arguments I could think of against the current CA/TLS/HTTPS situation, a hobbyist deciding to write their own web server would not be one of them... Yes, you should just conform and stop doing this. Or at the very least you could let another process to TLS termination and just handle HTTP if you really want to create your own off-by-one remote code execution errors instead of using the ones supplied by apache et al.
• JoshTheGeek 12y ago
  I wonder how many of the cheap web hosts will impelent this. I think the increased hosting cost on top of the certificate itself also discourages people from using TLS. Wishful thinking, perhaps...
• andrewbarba 12y ago
  This news put a huge grin on my face. Let's hope Heroku drops that ridiculous $20 charge for SSL endpoint as well.
• Thesaurus 12y ago
  NSA shilling in full force I see. You guys sure can trust this CA, I guarantee it :^)
• cm2187 12y ago
  That's a great idea and I'm a big fan of the EFF. But what browser support will this have? Even if all browser on all platforms add this to their root certificates, how many years will it take before even half of the devices in use support it (remember the number of people still using windows XP!)
  • schoen 12y ago
    It's initially cross-signed by IdenTrust, which has wide browser support today.
• bmahsh 12y ago
  Hi. This such an amazing project to work on. Who started this? Who came up with this idea?
• jpetersonmn 12y ago
  I just setup a ssl certificate on my website for the first time and it only took like 10 minutes all together. I don't get any warnings from any browsers and it was only. $10
• mailong90 12y ago
  http://benhxahoi168.com/nguyen-nhan-gay-benh-lau http://benhxahoi168.com/nguyen-nhan-gay-benh-lau
• mkhpalm 12y ago
  I don't want to be a full-fledged sponsor but I'd love to see a donate function to their site. Once this is released if the CA is trusted by all the major browsers I am more than willing to shift all the money we spend in certs from all these other "authorities" to something constructive like this.
• dutchbrit 12y ago
  Wondering how they're going to cover the costs of being a CA.
• chmike 12y ago
  Wouldn't this result in putting all the eggs in a single basket ? Beside, as an European, I'm not so excited that such initiative is under control of American Law. I suspect that American interests will prevail.
  • schoen 12y ago
    Would you like to spell out more explicitly which effects of U.S. jurisdiction you're most concerned with? I agree that there are several possible effects of jurisdiction on CAs that people could reasonably be concerned with (whether as would-be certificate requestors or would-be relying parties), but I'm wondering which ones are concerning you most.
    • pluma 12y ago
      NSLs? US agencies are legally able to perform MITM attacks under US jurisdiction.
    • chmike 12y ago
      The effect is that the NSA, the FBI or others could obtain the private key of the EFF root CA through legal arm twisting and gagging. Certificates are public, so there is no problem with certificate request. If the project is US only, than it won't make much difference with the actual situation. It wasn't explicit in the announcement.
• interesting_guy 12y ago
  wohoo. i hope this will be good.
• drderidder 12y ago
  This is a great initiative. On the other hand, I'm beginning to think that security models based on any central authority will always be at risk of getting compromised from within. Techniques that allow trusted security to be established between two parties without the need for a third-party authority to validate them would be nice to see.
• chunkiestbacon 12y ago
  The real problem here is that http is unencrypted by default. It really should be encrypted so that passive listeners can't see the traffic. I know that this is no protection against man in the middle attacks, but at least WiFi sniffers and similiar would be stopped. State Actors would have to actively do something which might be registered. It would be a great improvement, because in the current system, most websites are going to stay unencrypted because it takes money and effort to set up a certificate. The millions of shared hosters won't do it by default. What we can do: - Change the http protocol to be encrypted? - create an apache module that automatically does this and needs no setup time (generate private keys automatically?) Of course there shouldn't be any indicator of this encryption in the adress bar of the browser. Maybe it's too late.
• niutech 12y ago
  Even today you can have all your HTTP traffic encrypted and compressed, using Mozilla Janus[1] or Data Compression Proxy[2]. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/janus-proxy-configurator/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/janus-proxy-c... [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/data-compression-proxy/ajfiodhbiellfpcjjedhmmmpeeaebmep/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/data-compression-p...