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HTTP 2.0 May Be SSL-Only
An anonymous reader writes "In an email to the HTTP working group, Mark Nottingham laid out the three top proposals about how HTTP 2.0 will handle encryption. The frontrunner right now is this: 'HTTP/2 to only be used with https:// URIs on the "open" Internet. http:// URIs would continue to use HTTP/1.' This isn't set in stone yet, but Nottingham said they will 'discuss formalising this with suitable requirements to encourage interoperability.' There appears to be support from browser vendors; he says they have been 'among those most strongly advocating more use of encryption.' The big goal here is to increase the use of encryption on the open web. One big point in favor of this plan is that if it doesn't work well (i.e., if adoption is poor), then they can add support for opportunistic encryption later. Going from opportunistic to mandatory encryption would be a much harder task. Nottingham adds, 'To be clear — we will still define how to use HTTP/2.0 with http:// URIs, because in some use cases, an implementer may make an informed choice to use the protocol without encryption. However, for the common case — browsing the open Web — you'll need to use https:// URIs and if you want to use the newest version of HTTP.'"
otherwise this sounds like extortion from CAs
People think that adding encryption to something makes it more secure. No, it does not. Encryption is worthless without secure key exchange, and no matter how you dress it up, our existing SSL infrastructure doesn't cut it. It never has. It was built insecure. All you're doing is adding a middle man, the certificate authority, that somehow you're supposed to blindly trust to never, not even once, fuck it up and issue a certificate that is later used to fuck you with. www.microsoft.com can be signed by any of the over one hundred certificate authorities in your browser. The SSL protocol doesn't tell the browser to check all hundred plus for duplicates; it just goes to the one that signed it and asks: Are you valid?
The CA system is broken. It is so broken it needs to be put on a giant thousand mile wide sign and hoisted int orbit so it can be seen at night saying: "This system is fucked." Mandating a fucked system isn't improving security!
Show me where and how you plan on making key exchange secure over a badly compromised and inherently insecure medium, aka the internet, using the internet. It can't be done. No matter how you cut it, you need another medium through which to do the initial key exchange. And everything about SSL comes down to one simple question: Who do you trust? And who does the person you trusted, in turn, trust? Because that's all SSL is: It's a trust chain. And chains are only as strong as the weakest link.
Break the chain, people. Let the browser user take control over who, how, and when, to trust. Establish places in the real world, in meat space, in bricks and mortar land, where people can go to obtain and validate keys from multiple trusted parties. That's the only way you're going to get real security... otherwise you're going to be taking a butt torpedo stamped Made At NSA Headquarters up your browser backside. And pardon me for being so blunt, but explaining the technical ins and outs is frankly beyond this crowd today. Most of you don't have the technical comprehension skills you think you do -- so I'm breaking it down for you in everyday english: Do not trust certificate authorities. Period. The end. No debate, no bullshit, no anti-government or pro-government or any politics. The system is inherently flawed, at the atomic level. It cannot be fixed with a patch. It cannot be sufficiently altered to make it safe. It is not about who we allow to be certificate authorities, or whether this organization or that organization can be trusted. We're talking hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue riding on someone's word. You would have to be weapons grade stupid to think they will never be tempted to abuse that power -- and it does not matter who you put in that position. Does. Not. Matter.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
We save about 10% of our Internet bandwidth by running all http traffic through a caching proxy. This would seem to prevent this bandwidth saving for things that just don't need encryption. This would be any public site that is largely consumable content. All in favour of it for anything more personal.
Also how are companies supposed to effectively web filter if everything is HTTPS. DNS filtering is, in general, too broad as brush. We may not like our web filtered, but companies have a legal duty that employees shouldn't be see questionable material, even if on someone else's computer. Companies have been sued for allowing this to happen.
You can laugh at the IETF as much as you want, there are lots of things to laugh at. However, there are still a lot of very technical people involved in the IETF, and a large subset of them are finding it unpleasant that the Internet they helped create has become something very different. They are fighting the hard fight right now, and we should all support them when we can.
It is possible that the NSA or other similar dark forces may manage to subvert their intentions once more, but so far it looks like there is still hope for the good guys.
Or I may be hopelessly naive.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
StartSSL was without charge for individuals the last time I checked. The most expensive part of SSL nowadays for a small site operated as a hobby is the dedicated IP address that you need if you want users of IE on Windows XP and Android Browser on Android 2.x to be able to access your site. These browsers don't support SNI, which allows name-based virtual hosting to work on SSL.
The problem is that all http clients see 'https' as meaning the client has a level of expectation about 'security'. Browsers have long started to do things to very obvious to denote 'good ssl' from 'bad ssl', but the expectation remains that 's' means 'meaningfully secure'.
So how best to convey 'encrypted, but don't really care about third party cert validation', which would be a must-have in a world where *every* public facing site has a TLS protected socket. Maybe a different uri scheme like 'httpe://', complete with the scare strikethroughs and such, but not with the 'are you sure, are you really really sure' that https does today...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
This is already a pain in the ass for me. I use a local proxy/filter (Proxomitron) to allow me to filter my HTTP streams for any application w/o having to configure them individually - or in cases where something like AdBlock would be browser specific. This doesn't work for HTTPS.
For example, Google's switch to HTTPS-only annoys me to no end as I use Proxomitron to clean up and/or disable their various shenanigans - like the damn sidebar, URL redirects, suggestions, etc... At this time using "nosslsearch.google.com" with CNAME of "www.google.com" works to get a non-encrypted page (in Proxomitron, I simply edit the "Host:" header for nosslsearch.google.com hits to be www.google.com) but who know how much longer that will last.
Thankfully, DuckDuckGo and StartPage allow me to customize their display to my liking w/o having to edit it on the fly. If only Google would get their head out of the ass and support the same, rather than only allowing their definition of "enhanced user experience".
Seriously, do we really *need* HTTPS for everything - like *most* web searches, browsing Wikipedia or News? I think not.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If everything is to go SSL, we now need widespread "man-in-the-middle" intercept detection. This requires a few things:
Unless I run my own DNS, which is far easier than running a CA.
Not if you are using DNSSEC, it isn't. You talk about running your own DNS under those conditions as though a self-signed cert doesn't require a CA; it does. There's no such thing as certs without a CA...
DANE (DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities) RFC6698 does NOT require the use of a recognized CA, although it does not disallow it. There are four "usage" types for certificates (excerpts from the RFC follows):
Both Certificate usage 2 and Certificate usage 3 allow a domain's administrator to issue a certificate without requiring the involvement of a third party CA. For more information on DANE, refer to either rfc6698 or the the wikipedia article.
Yes, there is a lot of need for HTTP 2.
HTTP was great when pages were largely just a single block of HTML, but modern pages include many separate resources which are all downloaded over separate connections, and have for a long time, actually. HTTP pipelining helps by reducing the number of TCP connections that have to be established, but they still have to be sequential per connection, and you still need a substantial number of connections to parallelize download. This all gets much worse for HTTPS connections because each connection is more expensive to establish.
HTTP 2 is actually just Google's SPDY protocol (though there may be minor tweaks in standardization, the draft was unmodified SPDY), which fixes these issues by multiplexing many requests in a single TCP connection. The result is a significant performance improvement, especially on mobile networks. HTTP 2 / SPDY adds another powerful tool as well: it allows servers to proactively deliver content that the client hasn't yet requested. It's necessary for the browser to parse the page to learn what other resources are required, and in some cases there may be multiple levels of "get A, discover B is needed, get B, discover C is needed...". With SPDY, servers that know that B, C and D are going to be needed by requesters of A can go ahead and start delivering them without waiting.
The result can be a significant increase in performance. It doesn't benefit sites that pull resources from many different domains, because each of those must be a separate connection, and it tends to provide a lot more value for sites that are already heavily optimized for performance, because those that aren't tend to have lots of non-network bottlenecks that dominate latency. Obviously it will be well-optimized sites that can make use of the server-initiated resource delivery, too.
Actually, though, Google has decided that SPDY isn't fast enough, and has built and deployed yet another protocol, called QUIC, which addresses a major remaining problem of SPDY: it's built on TCP. TCP is awesome, make no mistake, it's amazing how well it adapts to so many different network environments. But it's not perfect, and we've learned a lot about networking in the last 30 years. One specific problem that TCP has is that one lost packet will stall the whole stream until that packet loss is discovered and resent. QUIC is built on top of UDP and implements all of the TCP-analogue congestion management, flow control and reliability itself, and does it with more intelligence than can be implemented in a simple sliding window protocol.
I believe QUIC is already deployed and is available on nearly all Google sites, but I think you have to get a developer version of Chrome to see it in action. Eventually Google will (as they did with SPDY) start working with other browser makers to get QUIC implemented, and with standards bodies to get it formalized as a standard.
Relevant to the topic of the article, neither SPDY nor QUIC even have an unencrypted mode. If the committee decides that they want an unencrypted mode they'll have to modify SPDY to do it. It won't require rethinking any of how the protocol works, because SPDY security all comes from an SSL connection, so it's just a matter of removing the tunnel. QUIC is different; because SSL runs on TCP, QUIC had to do something entirely different. So QUIC has its own encryption protocol baked into it from the ground up.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You're confusing "CA" with "third party CA." You need a CA to have a certificate. Hint: the "C" in "CA" stands for "Certificate."
You are confusing a certificate with a certificate which most users trust (aka a Certificate Authority). A root certificate from a known Certificate Authority (i.e. an organization) is just a self signed certificate which is trusted by a large group of users. You need to have a certificate to have a CA, a CA without a certificate is well, useless.
The certificate usages 2 and 3 in the DANE specification should work with a self-signed X.509 cert and thus work without needing to involve a recognized CA, third-party CA, formal CA, or what ever you choose to call it.
I mean, I guess you could just open an editor and type something out that looks like a certificate pair, but it won't be mathematically usable, and it won't work when you try to do a Diffie-Hellman key exchange with it :)
Was this even suggested or are you trying to make yourself appear more intelligent by refuting an unmade claim which is condescendingly absurd?