<story><title>Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/certificate-authority-encrypt-entire-web</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pilif</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; A self signed certificate warning means &amp;quot;Warning! The admin on the site you&amp;#x27;re connecting to wants this conversation to be private but it hasn&amp;#x27;t been proven that he has 200 bucks for us to say he&amp;#x27;s cool&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;no. It means &amp;quot;even though this connection is encrypted, there is no way to tell you whether you are currently talking to that site or to NSA which is forwarding all of your traffic to the site you&amp;#x27;re on&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Treating this as a grave error IMHO is right because by accepting the connection over SSL, you state that the conversation between the user agent and the server is meant to be private.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee that to be true if the identity of the server certificate can&amp;#x27;t somehow be tied to the identity of the server.&lt;p&gt;So when you accept the connection unencrypted, you tell the user agent &amp;quot;hey - everything is ok here - I don&amp;#x27;t care about this conversation to be private&amp;quot;, so no error message is shown.&lt;p&gt;But the moment you accept the connection over ssl, the user agent assumes the connection to be intended to be private and failure to assert identity becomes a terminal issue.&lt;p&gt;This doesn&amp;#x27;t mean that the CA way of doing things is the right way - far from it. It&amp;#x27;s just the best that we currently have.&lt;p&gt;The solution is absolutely not to have browsers accept self-signed certificates though. The solution is something nobody hasn&amp;#x27;t quite come up with.</text></item><item><author>digitalsushi</author><text>This certificate industry has been such a racket. It&amp;#x27;s not even tacit that there are two completely separate issues that certificates and encryption solve.  They get conflated and non technical users rightly get confused about which thing is trying to solve a problem they aren&amp;#x27;t sure why they have.&lt;p&gt;The certificate authorities are quite in love that the self-signed certificate errors are turning redder, bolder, and bigger.  A self signed certificate warning means &amp;quot;Warning! The admin on the site you&amp;#x27;re connecting to wants this conversation to be private but it hasn&amp;#x27;t been proven that he has 200 bucks for us to say he&amp;#x27;s cool&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;But so what if he&amp;#x27;s cool?  Yeah I like my banking website to be &amp;quot;cool&amp;quot; but for 200 bucks I can be just as &amp;quot;cool&amp;quot;.  A few years back the browsers started putting extra bling on the URL bar if the coolness factor was high enough - if a bank pays 10,000 bucks for a really cool verification, they get a giant green pulsating URL badge.  And they should, that means someone had to fax over vials of blood with the governor&amp;#x27;s seal that it&amp;#x27;s a legitimate institute in that state or province.  But my little 200 dollar, not pulsating but still green certificate means &amp;quot;yeah digitalsushi definitely had 200 bucks and a fax machine, or at least was hostmaster@digitalsushi.com for damned sure&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;And that is good enough for users.  No errors?  It&amp;#x27;s legit.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s the difference between me coughing up 200 bucks to make that URL bar green, and then bright red with klaxons cause I didn&amp;#x27;t cough up the 200 bucks to be sure I am the owner of a personal domain?  Like I said, a racket.  The certificate authorities love causing a panic.  But don&amp;#x27;t tell me users are any safer just &amp;#x27;cause I had 200 bucks.  They&amp;#x27;re not.&lt;p&gt;The cert is just for warm and fuzzies.  The encryption is to keep snoops out.  If I made a browser, I would have 200 dollar &amp;quot;hostmaster&amp;quot; verification be some orange, cautious URL bar - &amp;quot;this person has a site that we have verified to the laziest extent possible without getting sued for not even doing anything at all&amp;quot;.  But then I probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t be getting any tips in my jar from the CAs at the end of the day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moe</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The solution is something nobody hasn&amp;#x27;t quite come up with.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;SSH has. It tells me:&lt;p&gt;WARNING, You are connecting to this site (fi:ng:er:pr:in:t) for the first time. Do your homework now. IF you deem it trustworthy right now then I will never bother you again UNLESS someone tries to impersonate it in the future.&lt;p&gt;That model isn&amp;#x27;t perfect either but it is much preferable over the model that we currently have, which is: Blindly trust everyone who manages to exert control over any one of the 200+ &amp;quot;Certificate Authorities&amp;quot; that someone chose to bake into my browser.</text></comment>
<story><title>Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web</title><url>https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/certificate-authority-encrypt-entire-web</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pilif</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; A self signed certificate warning means &amp;quot;Warning! The admin on the site you&amp;#x27;re connecting to wants this conversation to be private but it hasn&amp;#x27;t been proven that he has 200 bucks for us to say he&amp;#x27;s cool&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;no. It means &amp;quot;even though this connection is encrypted, there is no way to tell you whether you are currently talking to that site or to NSA which is forwarding all of your traffic to the site you&amp;#x27;re on&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Treating this as a grave error IMHO is right because by accepting the connection over SSL, you state that the conversation between the user agent and the server is meant to be private.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee that to be true if the identity of the server certificate can&amp;#x27;t somehow be tied to the identity of the server.&lt;p&gt;So when you accept the connection unencrypted, you tell the user agent &amp;quot;hey - everything is ok here - I don&amp;#x27;t care about this conversation to be private&amp;quot;, so no error message is shown.&lt;p&gt;But the moment you accept the connection over ssl, the user agent assumes the connection to be intended to be private and failure to assert identity becomes a terminal issue.&lt;p&gt;This doesn&amp;#x27;t mean that the CA way of doing things is the right way - far from it. It&amp;#x27;s just the best that we currently have.&lt;p&gt;The solution is absolutely not to have browsers accept self-signed certificates though. The solution is something nobody hasn&amp;#x27;t quite come up with.</text></item><item><author>digitalsushi</author><text>This certificate industry has been such a racket. It&amp;#x27;s not even tacit that there are two completely separate issues that certificates and encryption solve.  They get conflated and non technical users rightly get confused about which thing is trying to solve a problem they aren&amp;#x27;t sure why they have.&lt;p&gt;The certificate authorities are quite in love that the self-signed certificate errors are turning redder, bolder, and bigger.  A self signed certificate warning means &amp;quot;Warning! The admin on the site you&amp;#x27;re connecting to wants this conversation to be private but it hasn&amp;#x27;t been proven that he has 200 bucks for us to say he&amp;#x27;s cool&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;But so what if he&amp;#x27;s cool?  Yeah I like my banking website to be &amp;quot;cool&amp;quot; but for 200 bucks I can be just as &amp;quot;cool&amp;quot;.  A few years back the browsers started putting extra bling on the URL bar if the coolness factor was high enough - if a bank pays 10,000 bucks for a really cool verification, they get a giant green pulsating URL badge.  And they should, that means someone had to fax over vials of blood with the governor&amp;#x27;s seal that it&amp;#x27;s a legitimate institute in that state or province.  But my little 200 dollar, not pulsating but still green certificate means &amp;quot;yeah digitalsushi definitely had 200 bucks and a fax machine, or at least was hostmaster@digitalsushi.com for damned sure&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;And that is good enough for users.  No errors?  It&amp;#x27;s legit.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s the difference between me coughing up 200 bucks to make that URL bar green, and then bright red with klaxons cause I didn&amp;#x27;t cough up the 200 bucks to be sure I am the owner of a personal domain?  Like I said, a racket.  The certificate authorities love causing a panic.  But don&amp;#x27;t tell me users are any safer just &amp;#x27;cause I had 200 bucks.  They&amp;#x27;re not.&lt;p&gt;The cert is just for warm and fuzzies.  The encryption is to keep snoops out.  If I made a browser, I would have 200 dollar &amp;quot;hostmaster&amp;quot; verification be some orange, cautious URL bar - &amp;quot;this person has a site that we have verified to the laziest extent possible without getting sued for not even doing anything at all&amp;quot;.  But then I probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t be getting any tips in my jar from the CAs at the end of the day.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>krick</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s just the best that we currently have.&lt;p&gt;No, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t say so. Having SSL is better than having nothing pretty much on any site. But if you don&amp;#x27;t want to pay $200 somebody for &lt;i&gt;nothing&lt;/i&gt;, you would probably consider using http by default on your site, because it just looks &amp;quot;safer&amp;quot; to the user that knows nothing about cryptography because of how browsers behave. Which is nonsense. It&amp;#x27;s worse than nothing.&lt;p&gt;And CA are not &amp;quot;authorities&amp;quot; at all. They could lie to you, they could be compromised. Of course, the fact that this certificate has been confirmed by &amp;quot;somebody&amp;quot; makes it a little more reliable than if it never was confirmed by anyone at all, but these &amp;quot;somebodies&amp;quot;, CA, don&amp;#x27;t have any control over the situation, it&amp;#x27;s just some guys that came up with idea to make money like that early enough. You are as good CA as Symantec is, you can just start selling certificates and it would be the same — except, well, you are just some guy, so browsers wouldn&amp;#x27;t accept these certificates so it&amp;#x27;s worth nothing. It&amp;#x27;s all just about trust, and I&amp;#x27;m not sure I trust Symantec more than I trust you. (And I don&amp;#x27;t mean I actually trust you, by the way.)&lt;p&gt;For everyone else it&amp;#x27;s not really about SSL, security and CAs, it&amp;#x27;s just about how popular browsers behave.&lt;p&gt;So, no, monopolies existing for the reason they are &lt;i&gt;allowed&lt;/i&gt; to do something are never good. Only if they do it for free.</text></comment>