Slashdot Mirror
How Far Have We Come With HTTPS? Google Turns On the Spotlight (networkworld.com)
alphadogg writes from an article on NetworkWorld: HTTPS is widely considered one of the keys to a safer Internet, but only if it's broadly implemented. Aiming to shed some light on how much progress has been made so far, Google on Tuesday launched a new section of its transparency report dedicated to encryption. Included in the new section is data highlighting the progress of encryption efforts both at Google and on popular third-party sites. "Our aim with this project is to hold ourselves accountable and encourage others to encrypt so we can make the Web even safer for everyone," wrote HTTPS evangelists Rutledge Chin Feman and Tim Willis on the Google Security Blog.
This is the first time one of these stories have come up and slashdot has had HTTPS enabled!
Better link to "other sites" report: https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/https/grid/?hl=en
Notice that Apple, Bing and Microsoft are all knocked for NOT running a "Modern TLS Config" and NOT using HTTPS by default. (I actually had to check that for myself - it was hard to believe that major companies are still NOT doing HTTPS by default - I enforce this even on my little podunk sites - but it was true!)
HTTPS isn't that safe. Any agency that can coerce one of the numerous CA's can snoop traffic quite easily. Of course Eric Schmidt is an avid fan of the surveillance society so thats why they weren't going to back anything less centralised than CA-based HTTPS
Google, er, Alphabet didnt really get a rock in their shoe about encryption until Edward Snowden so lets take a moment to thank their engineering consultant in Russia. Once it was revealed that the US government had placed secret taps on links between google datacenters to render their endpoint to service encryption meaningless, the company began working to make the internet a living hell for the surveillance state.
Google owns a browser, so that browser adopted SSL, then TLS as a mandatory connection parameter for google services. a pretty good share of Mozilla, at least in braintrust, is owned by Google and so getting firefox to endorse and enforce encrypted channels to google and other web services was childsplay. after a year, the titty got tougher and HSTS was the norm on some of the largest web content providers on the internet. SSL had been completely phased out for TLS 1.2 and strong AES256 crypto in light of a more concerned review of open source encryption after the governments audacious claim they could break in excess of 80% of encrypted traffic. Libressl hit the scene after some disclosures, DEFCON changed their status with US law enforcement to "its complicated" and now in this foul year of our lord 2016, uncle sams up proverbial shits creek with Apple in what will either be a resounding defeat, or a knock-down drag out multi decade battle at the hands of a corporation with more income and assets than most foreign nations. But slashdot, its only getting good.
googles set their target to the next generation of encryption, elliptic curve, and its looking to be a trend-setter. the primes used by most current elliptic are cooked up by NIST, and NIST has in the past been implicated in weakening encryption as part of US security policy. NIST primes are still used in chrome, but chrome supports Dan Bernsteins Curve25519 alternative that isnt intentionally gimped for uncle sam. Look for Google --and the internet-- to begin using this and other "safe curves" as standards to replace secp384r1 and prime256v1. devices and services in the year of the hoverboard are now shipping with encryption as a requirement, not an option, and features to disable it in browsers have been quietly retired. And perhaps the most resounding confirmation of the internets collective "fuck you" against the carte-blanc collection of data on citizens has come from outside the US. a majority of VPN and encrypted storage providers do not reside within the immediate jurisdiction of Washington.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Exactly. It's just more theater. 99% of those "cheap" ssl certificates are not validated AT ALL. People are blindly putting trust into a system that has none.
And on top of this, SSL is an exceptionally expensive computation. It takes rather expensive dedicated hardware to handle at any meaningful rate. (go play with the opensssl speed tool to see for yourself)
It's called LetsEncrypt. You only have to turn over appropriate access to your server to client software (even though to trust it you'd have to review the code or write it yourself). And your web server has to be able to access the LE servers, so you (currently at least) have to permit outbound access from a device providing the website (there are larger configs where you could mitigate that somewhat but this is the simple case).
The client hits the LE servers, gets a string to write to a server-specified location (/.well-known/acme-challenge/URI). Oh, and that retrieval by LE is done over HTTP, so there's NO chance that could ever be subverted.
Google, er, Alphabet didnt really get a rock in their shoe about encryption until Edward Snowden
While I think we should all be very grateful for Snowden's revelations, that's not true. Google was really serious about encrypting everything long before Snowden's revelations.
For example, Gmail was the first major webmail service to provide users the option of only using SSL, back in 2008 or so. Google turned on SSL for web searches in 2011. The design of SPDY, later adopted by the IETF as HTTP2, started around 2010 and from the beginning had no unencrypted mode (though the IETF insisted on adding one).
Once it was revealed that the US government had placed secret taps on links between google datacenters
Google actually started work on encrypting all of those data center links long before Snowden's information came out, though Snowden definitely did light a fire under the project, causing it to get fully deployed very quickly. Snowden probably also had a lot to do with Google's decision to completely disable non-TLS traffic for many of their services (IIRC it was 2014 when gmail and search went TLS-only).
Google owns a browser, so that browser adopted SSL, then TLS as a mandatory connection parameter for google services.
Chrome supported SSL and TLS before Snowden, and ownership of Chrome had nothing to do with making encryption mandatory for Google services, which was done in a browser-agnostic way. Chrome did provide a platform for Google to experiment with other improvements, though, such as certificate pinning, SPDY and QUIC. SPDY and QUIC are mostly about performance, but as I mentioned above Google build encryption into them from the ground up and never even bothered with unencrypted versions.
after a year, the titty got tougher and HSTS was the norm on some of the largest web content providers on the internet.
HSTS also predated Snowden, and Google even started using it for some services before Snowden. But, yes, again Snowden spurred much wider adoption. Which is awesome.
But slashdot, its only getting good.
Indeed. All new Internet protocols and standards now specifically address anti-surveillance in their designs, and lots of academic research is focused on new technologies to make surveillance hard. This is actually an even bigger change than the TLS push, etc., indicates. Prior to Snowden, preventing surveillance was not a design goal. If it happened, it happened by accident. No more. It's now a design goal for much of the tech industry.
Use an ACME client to obtain a domain-validated certificate without charge from the Let's Encrypt CA. If you have a VPS or bigger on its own IP address, you can install the official Let's Encrypt client. If you have shared hosting, you can install the sudo-less client, put the resulting ACME response page at the appropriate well-known URL (instead of running sudo python), grab the certificate, and then file a support ticket with your host to get the installed.
It doesn't matter that SSL is computationally expensive, because you don't use it to encrypt the entire session. Instead, you use it to exchange symmetric encryption keys in a secure manner and *those* keys (and algorithms) are what is used to encrypt the session. Even an old Xeon 5160 could encrypt 100-150 MB/s with AES-128 which is enough to keep up with a 1Gbps NIC.
Modern CPUs are even faster. Those are per-core numbers, so multiple by 4/8/12/16 (however many cores you have).