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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
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.