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SSL Still Mostly Misunderstood, Even By the Pros
An anonymous reader writes "People still don't understand SSL. This isn't much of a surprise... no one expects that grandma and grandpa know what SSL is and what it does. What is surprising and downright scary is that most IT professionals don't understand SSL, and many consider it to be the be-all, end-all of security in their organization. With all the tools out there to manipulate SSL connections, and the browser vendors unable to settle on a single method of showing if a site is secured by SSL or not, is it any wonder that no one gets it?"
Who proofreads these article submissions, anyway? Does anyone?
If you want to write a pretentious article about how people don't understand security of the interwebs, at least get the name right. That's right, SSL hasn't been considered "secure" for at least a decade.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Forcing people to implement both privacy and authentication in one package is half the problem with SSL. For most sites, it's more important to know that the site you're visiting is the same site you visited last time, than knowing that foo.example.com has a signed certificate approved by someone you never heard of. If these two functionalities were separated, so the browser just checked that a "non-certified" site's encryption key hadn't changed and let you through without comment if that was the case, then most sites using old or self-signed certificates would just use the encryption layer, and browsers COULD block access to sites with invalid certificates without causing people so much inconvenience they'd want to switch to a different browser that was less picky.
(yes, I know that this would probably be implemented using self-signed certificates, but it could be presented to the user as a "low security" site with an appropriate icon and at most a comment that "you haven't visited XXXX.example.com before, it is a low security site..." the first time you see it)
The correct term is "HTTPS". HTTPS, which can use various versions of SSL or TLS, is still mostly understood. Even by the pros.
How would HTTPS help? You'll still probably do an unencrypted DNS lookup for idle.slashdot.org.
This article would be funny if it weren't so sad. What's the reason computer professionals don't understand SSL? Bad documentation. And neither the Slashdot summary or the article to which Slashdot links is willing to link to documentation.
The Wikipedia explanation of SSL helps. This explanation helps, also.
The Do It Yourself SSL Guide is useful.
Have you ever tried teaching yourself the basics behind SSL, such as PKI and X.509 certificates? In an industry full of jargon and technalese, the security people are some of the worst for explaining things. The documentation out there is poor and cryptic. Ever wonder why encrypted or signed email never took off? Look no further than GnuPG or the Enigmail plug-in for Mozilla. Try finding out what DER encoding is, or ASC.1, or what PKCS#7 means. None of it's straight-forward, even for technical people.
The OpenSSL web site lists "[STILL INCOMPLETE]" for each of its manuals.
as the guy said in the article, it should kick you from a session at expired certs, not allow click through options
if the cert is expired/ unverifiable, the browser should simply kick the session, end of story
that should really be the only option available to anyone. its psychological: take this seriously, sorry for the inconvenience. otherwise, lazy admins will let their expired/ malformed certs hang out there for a lot longer (which i've seen even on a credit card site: capital one), because users just easily circumvent the roadblock. they'll definitely notice if no users can get through, and the angry emails pile in their inbox
i only allow https admin connections to my router, which of course means my browser screams about being unable to verify any certs... since i'm on a subnet. and i bet there are many other valid situations where expired/ unverified certs still represent a valid connection
however, add up all the valid situations where you want to continue an uncertified https connection, and you are left with nothing but a hill of beans in comparison to the mch more massive problem of psychologically just not taking https seriously enough
now you just have to convince the 3/4/5 major browser flavors to implement this new status quo
maybe the certificate authority should simply kick insecure browsers regardless (is that passed to the certificate authority during verification of cert?). that would get browser coders and vendors to notice. of course, what the browser report themselves can be hacked/ finessed, but if that's done maliciously, you're box is already owned, and its already game over regardless through a lot more powerful avenues
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
With the exception of pre-installed machines, we all have to download our web browsers. What would stop someone carrying out a man in the middle attack on a web browser or distribution download that provided a different Firefox that contains different CA keys. These CA keys could be designed to work the same with https websites, but would allow a man in the middle to also read off the information being transmitted.
Admittedly this would be very hard to do, but theoretically possible and with the resources of a nation state this may have already been done. As most machines are now built in the far east, what would stop the IE that ships with your computer from also having altered CA keys?
Would it even be possible to detect this? You could use MD5 checksums on your downloads, but most of the websites that show an MD5 are unsecure, so they could easily be showing a manipulated version of the checksum.
This strikes me as one of the biggest flaws of our reliance on SSL v2, v3, whatever.
Please tell me that this isn't possible.
Good luck. Google has 9,610,000 hits for ssl certificate and 1,350,000 hits for tls certificate.
By the way I use cacert to generate my certificates; it should be inlcuded in the default Firefox certification authorities list. I suspect there is money involved in getting into that list though.
CAcert failed a DRC audit. Bug 215243 comment 158 has the details.