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Firefox Prepares To Mark All HTTP Sites 'Not Secure' After HTTPS Adoption Rises (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the secretly-configured dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: The increased adoption of HTTPS among website operators will soon lead to browsers marking HTTP pages as "Not Secure" by default, and Mozilla is taking the first steps. The current Firefox Nightly Edition (version 59) includes a secret configuration option that when activated will show a visible visual indicator that the current page is not secure. In its current form, this visual indicator is a red line striking through a classic lock that's normally used to signal the presence of encrypted HTTPS pages. According to Let's Encrypt, 67% of web pages loaded by Firefox in November 2017 used HTTPS, compared to only 45% at the end of last year.

1 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. Servers on your LAN are probably Not Secure by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    HTTPS requires a certificate, and a certificate that requires a fully qualified domain name. The CA/Browser Forum's Baseline Requirements forbid issuing certificates in RFC 1918 private networks (such as 10/8 and 192.168/16) or the mDNS reserved domain (.local). This means everything on the average user's local area network will end up marked "Not Secure", such as the administration interface of the user's router, printer, or network attached storage (NAS) device.

    The document "Deprecating Non-Secure HTTP" states that Mozilla is aware of this problem but fails to offer a solution:

    Q. What about my home router? Or my printer?

    The challenge here is not that these machines can’t do HTTPS, it’s that they’re not provisioned with a certificate. A lot of times, this is because the device doesn’t have a globally unique name, so it can’t be issued a certificate in the same way that a web site can. There is a legitimate need for better technology in this space, and we’re talking to some device vendors about how to improve the situation.

    It should also be noted, though, that the gradual nature of our plan means that we have some time to work on this. As noted above, everything that works today will continue to work for a while, so we have some time to solve this problem.