I've seen people complain that Let's Encrypt is so easy that it's enabling the forced phaseout of long-lived certificates and unencrypted HTTP.
I sort of understand this, although it does feel like going "bcrypt is so easy to use it's enabling standards agencies to force me to use something newer than MD5". Like, yeah, once the secure way is sufficiently easy to use, we can then push everyone off the insecure way; that's how it's supposed to work.
Yeah, I hate how it made housing things locally without a proper domain name very difficult. My router _shouldn't_ have a globally recognized certificate, because it's not on a publicly visible host.
There's certainly advantages to easily available certificates, but that has enabled browsers and others to push too far; to be sure, though, that's not really a fault of Let's Encrypt, just the people who assume it's somehow globally applicable.
> My router _shouldn't_ have a globally recognized certificate, because it's not on a publicly visible host.
If you're not encrypting local network traffic then any rogue device on that network can decide to intercept it and steal your admin password. That's one of the biggest reasons why we adopted HTTPS in the first place - whether a host is public or not isn't relevant.
It doesn't need a "globally" recognized certificate signed by a public CA, self-signed ones are fine. At home I manage mine with XCA. I have a root CA that's installed on all of my devices, with name constrains set to ".internal", ensuring it can't be used to sign certificates for any other domains.
A related issue is that most consumer devices (both iPhone and current Android) make it impossible or extremely difficult to trust your own root CA for signing such certs.
Android is pretty easy, you just add it to the keystore and that's it. I've had my own CA long before Let's Encrypt, but now mostly only use it for non-public devices that can't easily use Let's Encrypt (printers, switches, etc).
You can add it to your user CA store, but no app will trust it since it's treated differently from the system CA store, which you can't modify without root or building your own ROM. In effect it is out of reach for most normal users, as well as people using security focused ROMs like Graphene, when ironically it can improve security in transit in many cases.
It's technically possible to get any Android app to accept user CAs. Unfortunately it requires unpacking it with apktool, adding a networkconfigoverride to the XML assets and pointing the AndroidManifest.xml to use it. Then restitch the APK with apktool, use jarsigner/apksigner and finally use zipalign.
Doesn't need a custom ROM, but it's so goddamn annoying that you might as well not bother. I know how to do these things; most users won't and given the direction the big G is heading in with device freedom, it's not looking all that bright for this approach either.
A long time ago when I was playing with rolling my own PKI, each of Android, iOS, Chrome, Firefox, and even Internet Explorer allowed me to install a root CA by opening the .crt file. From what I remember, iOS popped up some warnings and added the cert as part of a profile, but it did work.
I know things like MDM/Intune/Group Policy/etc and such can A) faciliate doing this on a large number of devices and B) prevent users from doing this on their own.
I don't want to trust my own root CA as I don't trust myself to keep it secure.
I want to important it only for a specific set of domains. "Allow this rootca to authenticate mydomain.com, addmanager.com, debuggingsite.com", which means even if compromised it won't be intercepting mybank.com
You can absolutely do that with name constraints extension set on the root CA certificate. You should verify compatibility but it's pretty universally supported on modern browsers and consumer devices last I checked.
If you generate the root CA sure. However name constraints aren't well supported.
A far better option would be to allow me, the user, to do this in the user agent. I can import my mitm cert and today I can trust it for "abc123.com" and point that to something I want to access in that manner for some reason, but tomorrow simply toggle that trust off.
If I find that I want to use a specific website and want to do something with the traffic, then I could point that DNS to my middle-box and turn that on in my browser. With name constraints I'd have to regenerate the root certificate with the new domain, and then re-import it.
the entire concept of the name constraints puts the power into the CA issuing person rather than the user.
Where are you finding that name constraints aren't supported? I've only come across that on embedded/IoT devices. They work fine for me across Firefox and Chrome on Linux, on Android, and they are supposed to work fine on Apple devices too.
> If I find that I want to use a specific website and want to do something with the traffic...
I agree but that's a different problem. If you just need a certificate for your router and some internal services (the original discussion), you can do that using an internal root CA and you have nothing to worry about as long as you using name constraints.
On IoT devices without nameConstraints support I just use an alternative CA certificate without name constraints (same key, different extensions).
Random anecdote: I have a device in which the http client can't handle https. Runs out of memory and crashes. Wasn't able to find a free host with a public http to host a proxy.
> Like, yeah, once the secure way is sufficiently easy to use, we can then push everyone off the insecure way; that's how it's supposed to work.
The problem is that this requires work and validation, which no beancounter ever plans for. And the underlings have to do the work, but don't get extra time, so it has to be crammed in, condensing the workday even more. For hobbyist projects it's even worse.
That is why people are so pissed, there is absolutely zero control over what the large browser manufacturers decide on a whim. It's one thing if banks or Facebook or other truly large entities get to do work... but personal blogs and the likes?
We've reached a point where securing your hobby projects essentially means setting the "use_letsencrypt = true" config option in your web server. I bet configuring it takes less time than you spent reading this HN thread.
And with regards to the beancounters: that is exactly why the browsers are pushing for it. Most companies aren't willing time and effort into proper certificate handling procedures. The only way to get them to secure their shit is by forcing them: do it properly, or your website will go offline. And as it turns out, security magically gets a lot more attention when ignoring it has a clear and direct real-world impact.
Cloudflare uses HTTP to connect to your website before caching the content. I’ve always found it highly insecure. You could have HTTPS with Letsencrypt, but you need to deactivate Cloudflare when you want to renew (or use the other validation that is complex enough that I didn’t succeed to do it).
Don't pick on this particular SSL requirement, pick on the deluge of requirements that only make sense for a site that sells something or handles personal data (i.e. has accounts). They get extended to $RANDOM_SITE that only serves static text and the occasional cat photo for no good reason except "your cats will be more secure!".
GP: At least on business plans this is incorrect, it defaults to (last time I checked) accepting any SSL certificate including self signed from edge to origin and it’s a low friction option to enforce either valid or provided CA/PubKey certs for the same path.
Parent: those innocuous cat photos are fine in the current political climate… “First they came for the cat pic viewers, but I did not speak up…”
How does SSL on a -ing public site protect you from being arrested by miniluv?
It’s public, you want everyone to see the cat photos, that’s why you set up the site. On the contrary, SSL certs mean another party through which miniluv can track you. They prove or are supposed to prove identity not hide it.
Sorry that wasn’t particularly clear, I was taking more about the general advantageous nature of normalising encryption.
WRT to another party to track you, one of the benefits of LE is that you only need to provide proof of domain ownership (eg dns txt) so the only tie back to you is whatever information you give to the registrar that you have to provide anyway.
The statement that Cloudflare uses HTTP to connect to your website can be false depending on how you configure it. For years, I have had personal websites with Cloudflare as the CDN and with Let’s Encrypt providing certificates on the web server. All I do is choose Full (Strict) in the TLS settings on Cloudflare. So the connection between the end user to Cloudflare and from Cloudflare to my web server are on HTTPS. No deactivation of Cloudflare required on my end during renewal (my web host, like many others, has the certificate generation automated and getting a TLS certificate just a toggle on my admin dashboard).
> That is why people are so pissed, there is absolutely zero control over what the large browser manufacturers decide on a whim. It's one thing if banks or Facebook or other truly large entities get to do work... but personal blogs and the likes?
Yep. There are plenty of things on the Internet for which TLS provides zero value. It is absolutely nonsensical to try to force them into using it, but the browser community is hell bent on making that bad decision. It is what it is.
I can understand this in in certain contexts, such as a site that exists solely to post public information of no value to an attacker.
A local volunteer group that posts their event schedule to the web were compelled to take on the burden of https just to keep their site from being labeled as a potential threat. They don't have an IT department. They aren't tech people. The change multiplied the hassles of maintaining their site. To them, it is all additional cost with no practical benefit over what they had before.
This is why more and more organizations get away with only having social media pages where they don't have to worry about security or other technical issues.
Unfortunately, placing the information on a social media page burdens the people seeking it with either submitting to the social media site's policies and practices, or else not having access to it. This is not a good substitute.
It also contributes to the centralization of the web, placing more information under the control of large gatekeepers, and as a side effect, giving those gatekeepers even more influence.
Most social media are free and easy to sign up for taking under a minute to do and have user bases that can be measured in the billions. Most people in the world are willing to follow the rules.
Most people don't use social media via the web. They use it via dedicated apps. I think it's natural that people who don't want to deal with the tech side of things will outsource it to someone else. The idea that everyone will host their own tech is unrealistic.
For now, in some jurisdictions, social media is "free" for your customers in the sense that it's supported by advertising.
It's not free for you of course because advertising isn't free and from their point of view what you'd be getting is free advertising so they want you to pay them to put it in front of your customers.
The work and technical expertise to setup let's encrypt is less than the work to register a domain, set up a web server, and configure DNS to point to it.
You seem to have missed what I wrote in the first place: They aren't tech people.
It is additional work, and requires additional knowledge.
It was also not available from most of the free web hosts that sites like these used before the https push. So investigating alternatives and migrating were required. In other words, still more work.
I sort of understand this, although it does feel like going "bcrypt is so easy to use it's enabling standards agencies to force me to use something newer than MD5". Like, yeah, once the secure way is sufficiently easy to use, we can then push everyone off the insecure way; that's how it's supposed to work.