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'Let's Encrypt' Project Strives To Make Encryption Simple
jones_supa writes: As part of an effort to make encryption a standard component of every application, the Linux Foundation has launched the Let's Encrypt project (announcement) and stated its intention to provide access to a free certificate management service. Jim Zemlin, executive director for the Linux Foundation, says the goal for the project is nothing less than universal adoption of encryption to disrupt a multi-billion dollar hacker economy. While there may never be such a thing as perfect security, Zemlin says it's just too easy to steal data that is not encrypted. In its current form, encryption is difficult to implement and a lot of cost and overhead is associated with managing encryption keys. Zemlin claims the Let's Encrypt project will reduce the effort it takes to encrypt data in an application down to two simple commands. The project is being hosted by the Linux Foundation, but the actual project is being managed by the Internet Security Research Group. This work is sponsored by Akamai, Cisco, EFF, Mozilla, IdenTrust, and Automattic, which all are Linux Foundation patrons. Visit Let's Encrypt official website to get involved.
Having conversations that your government can't eavesdrop on is tantamount to terrorism.
You have been warned.
Making it simple will go a long way to avoiding PEBCAK problems. Simpler processes give less opportunity for human error.
Encryption you don't have to think about is probably pretty vulnerable.
I consider myself somewhat crypto savvy (I've read a lot of crypto papers and can do some basic differential and linear cryptanalysis), but I don't encrypt any of my files or e-mails. For me the costs outweigh the benefits.
Encrypt everything! Bummer about the decryption man pages...
I can see that one unintended consequence might be an increase in using encryption to obfuscate applications for commercial / anticompetitive reasons, as well as illegal reasons.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Certs don't work, never have. Aggregating so much power and responsibility into the hands of CAs is just as foolish as key escrows run by governments and organized crime. Something will always go wrong there will always be too much incentive locked up in ensuring that it does. The more successful and useful a "simple" solution for everyone becomes the more incentive exists to coopt it.
The answer is not doubling down on these things and "encrypting" just because you can or just because its easy.
Most systems worth securing already require you to provide a password to login. If you want to improve the status quo and really make a difference then get browser vendors to natively support secure logins via TLS-SRP and relegate free certs to the margins for service discovery and account setup where there is no other practical means of establishing trust.
ITbusinessweek is wrong: The linix foundation neither started or initiated this project, it only took over its hosting. The press release of the foundation clearly states this.
Its ok for us linux nerds
Seriously, this is all about low barriers of access to SSL certs for webservers, the vast majority of which are either linux or other ix based. Client systems general dont need these certs, so they are not relevant. They just need a suitable root CA Cert.
At some point, and my guess is pretty darn soon, reasonable people are going to have a very secure cryptobracelet that they never take off, or if you take it off it will never work again.
The bracelet would work like the NFC chip in current phones, it would create unique identifiers for each transaction, so you can be verified that you are who you are without ever broadcasting your identity.
Then, all email and every other communication can easily be encrypted, securely, and without adding complication. You won't have to worry about remembering a hundred passwords, or about what happens when the store you bought things from is hacked, or that a library of 100 millions passwords will find yours.
I grant that some will protest that this is not natural (I don't want to wear something on my wrist!) but people do a hundred other unnatural things every day (brush their teeth, use deodorant, wear glasses, live longer than fifty years...) The benefits will be enormous, the changes minimal, and this will be led, I believe, by thought leaders.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Maybe you should try one of countless apple fanboi sites.
This is specifically about making it easy to offer an encrypted web site - so "Linux only" will mean it's available for the majority of websites in the world.
Unfortunately there seems to be a huge disconnect between what the Slashdot summary and linked article claims and what the actual Linux Foundation web page states is the goal (making encrypted websites easy to deploy). This is a much less ambitious project than the submitter thinks it is.
#DeleteChrome
Which is unfortunately utter bullshit and history is there to prove it.
Look at SSL for example. It's simple for the end-user, he/she doesn't need to do anything to use it, still it has failed us many times now.
Good encryption isn't simple, you need to know what you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, you also don't know if you make mistakes. You can also easily become a target of phishers or other con artists.
Yeah, let me know when OS X runs on server hardware and we can talk about encrypting web sites being hosted on OS X.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Yes it will.
OK you want to encrypt a file. You find instructions and you follow each step correctly you got a encrypted system.
Now following steps is stuff a computer can do. You need humans to do things a little more creative. So it makes sense that you have a simpler process for this. That does all the non-simple things in a few commands.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Last I checked, UK is a democracy, you voted them into power, you chose your fate.
If it were the US, I would say start a letter writing campaign, but I don't know exactly how the UK system works.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Back under your bridge troll........
I just keep good backups. Encrypted, of course. With the fact that SSDs actually overwrite deleted data when the garbage collector decides to, deleted data tends to be -gone- for good.
You need to use a deniable encryption system for this, then. Rubberhose comes immediately to mind, but it is no longer maintained.
Essentially, what it does is enable you to store several file systems in the same disk volume, which will have had its contents randomized in the formatting process. What blocks of the disk are used for each file system is not known until the key is provided. For that matter -- and this is the deniable part -- what file systems even exist is not knowable without having all of the keys.
So, they ask for a key, you give them one. They ask you for "the rest of the keys" you give them a few more, but there is no way to prove, one way or the other, that all of the keys have or have not been provided.
www.wavefront-av.com
Or at least, "software running on web servers"?
Is it merely the case that any server (email, XMPP, murmur, etc.) you want to get a "valid" certificate for has to also have a webserver running on it to use this system, or is it literally only intended for "web servers"?
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I know this may be ancient history to you, but it really wasn't that long ago.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/ar...
You should always fight expansion of powers as they can be used by bad actors just as easily as good actors.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The draft of the "Let's Encrypt" Certificate Policy is available in PDF here: https://letsencrypt.org/ISRG-C... Note that the PDF document's title is "Microsoft Word". I find that rather unusual for the Linux Foundation! Wasn't LibreOffice or some other Linux-available office suite good enough to write that document? I'm surprised that they are using a Windows desktop for everyday tasks such as document editing.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
They dont need to, the packages are signed, they are not trying to keep the contents of the packages secret, or hide thier contents during transfer, they are only trying to ensure that they are distributed unmodified. To perform a MITM attack on the packages pulled down from a repo, you would need the private signing keys To creat new packages.
Looking through most of the .repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d on my fedora install, all the dl links are already https.
I suspect that ubuntu is the same.
Its probaly full of holes, i dont think i have seen a decent, analysis of the package managers from a security standpoint, but they seem to have most of the basics.
I dont know if the private keys are distributed to the packagers, if they are then that could be an issue.
Why does it need to be secret?
All you need is an integrity check, and the packages are all signed with the key which is included in the initial distro image (which is itself signed, available over HTTPS and has publicly published checksums).
Encryption is not necessary here. To believe it is is to completely misunderstand the purpose of encryption.
(1) He didn't say it eliminates PEBCAK, he said it will go a long way in reducing (avoiding) problems. If you dispute this, I'd like to know why.
(2) He didn't say encryption was simple. In fact he almost implied that it isn't simple (of course it's not), that's why we need to not expose end users to aspects that require expert-level knowledge.
I feel like bazmail said something akin to, "A bike helps me get to work faster (than walking)" and you're shouting, "A plane won't help you get to work any faster!!!"
A self-signed certificate makes two guarantees. First, if the public key you see is the same public key you saw the first time you connected to that host, then a MITM probably hasn't been introduced since your first connection. SSH uses this "key continuity management" (KCM) or "trust on first use" (TOFU) model, as did OS X prior to the introduction of Gatekeeper. Granted, the MITM can harm the first connection to a given host.
But the second guarantee even in the face of day-one MITM is route diversity. The Perspectives extension uses notary servers to act as consensus CAs. This ensures that the public key you're seeing is the same public key everyone else sees for that hostname, which means that if there is a MITM, it's between the server and its only connection to the Internet (the "Lserver" attack in the Usenix 08 paper describing Perspectives).
So the biggest difference between a self-signed certificate and a domain-validated certificate is that the latter prevents an Lserver attack on your first connection.
Yeah, let me know when OS X runs on server hardware
It took me about five seconds to search the web for os x server, which pointed me to Yosemite Server for $19.99. If you're insinuating that a Mac mini is not "server hardware", I'd be interested in your reasoning.
It takes literally four lines of code to bring up HTTPS on a Python 2 server.
So if you plan to use your TLS server only for inner protocols other than HTTP, I imagine someone will probably adapt Let's Encrypt to bring up a temporary HTTPS server when obtaining or renewing a certificate.
I've needed on a number of occasions to recover data from disks I can't boot from.
Then you have inadequate backups. That's a different issue from encryption.
The writer seems to me to be confused between encryption of web traffic and encryption of data in general.
AFAIK, Let's Encrypt is all about making https universal. It has nothing to do with encypting application data.
Anonymous Coward wrote:
OS X is infinitely faster
"Infinitely"? I'll assume that was hyperbole.
stabler
Even in the face of electromagnetic noise flipping bits in your RAM? Unlike Linux, OS X is intended to run exclusively on Mac hardware. And this comment insinuates that Macs don't support high-reliability RAM or power supplies.