11 ms·

Making Pinterest HTTPS

95 points by cpeterso 12y ago

pzb 12y ago
Too bad they didn't include any info on the "unknown Safari issue"
- finnn 12y ago
  >Our UK experiment provided data that showed a small percentage of users had problems logging in after the migration. We pinpointed this to Safari users, which allowed us to start investigating the root cause. Sounds like they don't really know much
finnn 12y ago
> safety is top priority yet they didn't go full https till early 2015 - when do we get to start pointing this shit out? Sidejacking attacks have been around for years (Hamster [1] is from 2007), and the millions of other reasons to do it just keep growing. I feel like at some point you can't say "safety is top priority" just for implementing HTTPS sitewide. [1] http://blog.erratasec.com/2007/08/sidejacking-with-hamster_05.html http://blog.erratasec.com/2007/08/sidejacking-with-hamster_0...
- yeukhon 12y ago
  > We identified and mitigated many technical challenges in the discovery process of the migration. Turning on HTTPS is not a one-step migration. Turning on CSP has also proven to be very difficult for nearly every site who wishes to turn it on. Where I work I am dealing with production issue with one of the security features, which by enabling it we observed redirection loop. I am not saying this is an excuse but there are challenges.
  - finnn 12y ago
    I'm not saying it's easy, but if "safety is top priority", it shouldn't take this long.
- ffn 12y ago
  It's just a saying; a platitude like "get well soon", "just be yourself", or "employees must wash hands". Safety (really security in general) is top priority only after you've already knocked out user acquisition, basic short term financial stability, and product stability. As such, by "safety is a top priority", they really mean "safety is a top priority now".
Animats 12y ago
It's security theater to encrypt everything. If you have to let some content delivery network decrypt your HTTPS sessions, you've created a central wiretapping point at the CDN. If you only encrypt login pages and such, and have a server with higher security handling them, you're at least protecting passwords and user identification. If decryption has to be moved out into the CDN to support encryption of cat pictures, security has been reduced.
- eloy 12y ago
  You can still move the login pages out of the CDN?
  - Animats 12y ago
    You can do that. You need a separate login domain, with its own server and SSL cert. The cat videos can go through the main domain and CDN. HTTPS security seems to be going downhill where it matters. "wellsfargo.com" not only has just a cheezy "domain validated only" SSL cert, but their "sign up for online access" link redirects to "https://adfarm.mediaplex.com" https://adfarm.mediaplex.com". Bank of America used to run the secure pages through "secure.bankofamerica.com" from their own servers. Now everything comes from one domain, and it's front-ended by an Akamai service.
    - mike_hearn 12y ago
      Is it really new? People have always outsourced hosting. Complaining that CloudFlare or Akamai have access to an SSL cert makes as much sense to me as complaining that RackSpace has access to it, when someone was hosting their stuff in their datacenters.
  - pornel 12y ago
    If the CDN is malicious and can MITM, then this won't help — the CDN could rewrite all links and redirects to the login page.
- agwa 12y ago
  > If decryption has to be moved out into the CDN to support encryption of cat pictures, security has been reduced. That doesn't logically follow. The CDN doesn't have to start handling logins just because the "cat pictures" are now being served over HTTPS. > If you only encrypt login pages and such, and have a server with higher security handling them, you're at least protecting passwords and user identification It's impossible to provide meaningful security this way - if the pages linking to the login page aren't HTTPS, it's trivial to sslstrip them. Only a very small fraction of users will notice when this happens.
jvehent 12y ago
Looks pretty good. Their configuration could use a larger DHE parameters (2048), replace RC4 with 3DES and enable OCSP Stapling. But it's already in the top 1% for TLS quality! $ ./cipherscan pinterest.com ................ Target: pinterest.com:443 prio ciphersuite protocols pfs_keysize 1 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 2 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 3 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 4 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 DH,1024bits 5 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 6 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384 TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 7 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 8 AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 9 AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 10 AES128-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 11 AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 12 AES256-SHA256 TLSv1.2 13 AES256-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 14 ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 15 RC4-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 Certificate: trusted, 2048 bit, sha256WithRSAEncryption signature TLS ticket lifetime hint: 300 OCSP stapling: not supported Server side cipher ordering
- casca 12y ago
  The use of RC4 is odd as it's fairly broken[1]. Misconfiguration? [1] http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/03/attack-of-week-rc4-is-kind-of-broken-in.html http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/03/attack-of-we...
  - AlyssaRowan 12y ago
    Misconfiguration. All RC4 ciphersuites are explicitly forbidden by RFC, and considered a severe vuln by CVE. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7465 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7465
    - jvehent 12y ago
      75% of alexa's top 1 million have RC4 enabled [1]. It will take a lot of evangelizing to finally get rid of it. [1] https://securitypitfalls.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/february-2015-scan-results/ https://securitypitfalls.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/february-2...
themusicgod1 12y ago
That's fantastic, but please don't ban tor users!
yummyfajitas 12y ago
Pinner safety is a top priority for us, and so earlier this year we joined the growing list of websites that are fully HTTPS. You had one job. https://i.imgur.com/7RCusOi.png https://i.imgur.com/7RCusOi.png (MTNL is an ISP in Delhi that I'm currently using to access the net. They are pretty shameless about running MITM attacks on virtually every webpage which is not fully HTTPS, such as engineering.pinterest.com.)
- finnn 12y ago
  Their blog is a tumblr, tumblr doesn't do https on their subdomains.
  - chimeracoder 12y ago
    If they use either a proxy or a service like Cloudflare, they can get some of the benefits of SSL/TLS (like preventing MITM attacks at the last-mile such as this one), while still using Tumblr to host their blog.
    - adventured 12y ago
      Don't you have to use Tumblr's DNS settings to link a custom domain with their service? And to use Cloudflare don't you have to use their DNS servers?
      - mirashii 12y ago
        You don't have to strictly speaking, you can use your own and just resolve in the same manner. You'd just need to monitor the results of a lookup on CF's servers and send back the same response with your own DNS.
    - corobo 12y ago
      Tumblr blocks requests from Cloudflare Edit: Sorry should source my claim. Primary source: It reverted back to my .tumblr.com domain when I tried it Also https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168566-How-do-I-add-a-Tumblr-custom-domain- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168566-H...
inthewoods 12y ago
Will this mean that website will lose the referral info from inbound links to their website from Pinterest? If so, that will really aggravate a lot of people.
- notatoad 12y ago
  They can get their referral info back by implementing https themselves.
- untog 12y ago
  FTA: "We used a meta referrer header to support HTTPS tracking to HTTP sites."

95 points by cpeterso 12y ago

pzb 12y ago

Too bad they didn't include any info on the "unknown Safari issue"

finnn 12y ago
>Our UK experiment provided data that showed a small percentage of users had problems logging in after the migration. We pinpointed this to Safari users, which allowed us to start investigating the root cause. Sounds like they don't really know much

finnn 12y ago

> safety is top priority yet they didn't go full https till early 2015 - when do we get to start pointing this shit out? Sidejacking attacks have been around for years (Hamster [1] is from 2007), and the millions of other reasons to do it just keep growing. I feel like at some point you can't say "safety is top priority" just for implementing HTTPS sitewide. [1] http://blog.erratasec.com/2007/08/sidejacking-with-hamster_05.html http://blog.erratasec.com/2007/08/sidejacking-with-hamster_0...

yeukhon 12y ago
> We identified and mitigated many technical challenges in the discovery process of the migration. Turning on HTTPS is not a one-step migration. Turning on CSP has also proven to be very difficult for nearly every site who wishes to turn it on. Where I work I am dealing with production issue with one of the security features, which by enabling it we observed redirection loop. I am not saying this is an excuse but there are challenges.
- finnn 12y ago
  I'm not saying it's easy, but if "safety is top priority", it shouldn't take this long.
ffn 12y ago
It's just a saying; a platitude like "get well soon", "just be yourself", or "employees must wash hands". Safety (really security in general) is top priority only after you've already knocked out user acquisition, basic short term financial stability, and product stability. As such, by "safety is a top priority", they really mean "safety is a top priority now".

Animats 12y ago

It's security theater to encrypt everything. If you have to let some content delivery network decrypt your HTTPS sessions, you've created a central wiretapping point at the CDN. If you only encrypt login pages and such, and have a server with higher security handling them, you're at least protecting passwords and user identification. If decryption has to be moved out into the CDN to support encryption of cat pictures, security has been reduced.

eloy 12y ago
You can still move the login pages out of the CDN?
- Animats 12y ago
  You can do that. You need a separate login domain, with its own server and SSL cert. The cat videos can go through the main domain and CDN. HTTPS security seems to be going downhill where it matters. "wellsfargo.com" not only has just a cheezy "domain validated only" SSL cert, but their "sign up for online access" link redirects to "https://adfarm.mediaplex.com" https://adfarm.mediaplex.com". Bank of America used to run the secure pages through "secure.bankofamerica.com" from their own servers. Now everything comes from one domain, and it's front-ended by an Akamai service.
  - mike_hearn 12y ago
    Is it really new? People have always outsourced hosting. Complaining that CloudFlare or Akamai have access to an SSL cert makes as much sense to me as complaining that RackSpace has access to it, when someone was hosting their stuff in their datacenters.
- pornel 12y ago
  If the CDN is malicious and can MITM, then this won't help — the CDN could rewrite all links and redirects to the login page.
agwa 12y ago
> If decryption has to be moved out into the CDN to support encryption of cat pictures, security has been reduced. That doesn't logically follow. The CDN doesn't have to start handling logins just because the "cat pictures" are now being served over HTTPS. > If you only encrypt login pages and such, and have a server with higher security handling them, you're at least protecting passwords and user identification It's impossible to provide meaningful security this way - if the pages linking to the login page aren't HTTPS, it's trivial to sslstrip them. Only a very small fraction of users will notice when this happens.

jvehent 12y ago

Looks pretty good. Their configuration could use a larger DHE parameters (2048), replace RC4 with 3DES and enable OCSP Stapling. But it's already in the top 1% for TLS quality! $ ./cipherscan pinterest.com ................ Target: pinterest.com:443 prio ciphersuite protocols pfs_keysize 1 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 2 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 3 ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 4 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 DH,1024bits 5 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 6 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384 TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 7 ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 8 AES128-GCM-SHA256 TLSv1.2 9 AES128-SHA256 TLSv1.2 10 AES128-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 11 AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 12 AES256-SHA256 TLSv1.2 13 AES256-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 14 ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 ECDH,P-256,256bits 15 RC4-SHA TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2 Certificate: trusted, 2048 bit, sha256WithRSAEncryption signature TLS ticket lifetime hint: 300 OCSP stapling: not supported Server side cipher ordering

casca 12y ago
The use of RC4 is odd as it's fairly broken[1]. Misconfiguration? [1] http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/03/attack-of-week-rc4-is-kind-of-broken-in.html http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/03/attack-of-we...
- AlyssaRowan 12y ago
  Misconfiguration. All RC4 ciphersuites are explicitly forbidden by RFC, and considered a severe vuln by CVE. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7465 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7465
  - jvehent 12y ago
    75% of alexa's top 1 million have RC4 enabled [1]. It will take a lot of evangelizing to finally get rid of it. [1] https://securitypitfalls.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/february-2015-scan-results/ https://securitypitfalls.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/february-2...

themusicgod1 12y ago

That's fantastic, but please don't ban tor users!

yummyfajitas 12y ago

Pinner safety is a top priority for us, and so earlier this year we joined the growing list of websites that are fully HTTPS. You had one job. https://i.imgur.com/7RCusOi.png https://i.imgur.com/7RCusOi.png (MTNL is an ISP in Delhi that I'm currently using to access the net. They are pretty shameless about running MITM attacks on virtually every webpage which is not fully HTTPS, such as engineering.pinterest.com.)

finnn 12y ago
Their blog is a tumblr, tumblr doesn't do https on their subdomains.
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  If they use either a proxy or a service like Cloudflare, they can get some of the benefits of SSL/TLS (like preventing MITM attacks at the last-mile such as this one), while still using Tumblr to host their blog.
  - adventured 12y ago
    Don't you have to use Tumblr's DNS settings to link a custom domain with their service? And to use Cloudflare don't you have to use their DNS servers?
    - mirashii 12y ago
      You don't have to strictly speaking, you can use your own and just resolve in the same manner. You'd just need to monitor the results of a lookup on CF's servers and send back the same response with your own DNS.
  - corobo 12y ago
    Tumblr blocks requests from Cloudflare Edit: Sorry should source my claim. Primary source: It reverted back to my .tumblr.com domain when I tried it Also https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168566-How-do-I-add-a-Tumblr-custom-domain- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168566-H...

inthewoods 12y ago

Will this mean that website will lose the referral info from inbound links to their website from Pinterest? If so, that will really aggravate a lot of people.

notatoad 12y ago
They can get their referral info back by implementing https themselves.
untog 12y ago
FTA: "We used a meta referrer header to support HTTPS tracking to HTTP sites."