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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26189 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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If valid certs are routinely issued to malicious actors, then they are useless and the requirement to get one is cost without benefit. If they are not, the vetting process is both costly and easily abusable and the cost is too high for the benefit.

I mean, that's the invisible context shift though. Certs, by and large, aren't used to deny people access to modern secure web architecture. They are part of a set of technologies to verify the data you receive is from the person you think is sending it. They aren't supposed to stop you from giving your credit card information to a scam site directly. They are supposed to stop that scammer from manipulating your communications with Amazon.

But they could be used to deny people access to modern secure internet architecture. Just the same as DNS, hosting, banking, etc have been weaponized.

By this logic nobody should ever get a cert. I guess we should just transmit everything over the internet unencrypted for anyone to hoover up.

We could also use other methods of id than trusted third parties.

In many cases my threat model excludes the sort of attack that would be thwarted by a cert that could be issued to anyone. A cert makes sense if I'm talking to some known party -- a cert that proves that Bank of America is Bank of America, or Amazon is Amazon, and which won't be issued by some trusted cert issuer to just anyone. If I'm just publishing stuff, who cares that I bought a cert saying "This Really Is The Nybbler"?

The people who want to be sure they are talking to TheNybbler? Or that no third parties are listening to their traffic? I think it is good that browsers (at least mine, Firefox) allow people to click through invalid SSL cert prompts if people don't care, but I think the ubiquity of cert issuance is good for computer security and privacy generally.

MITM attacks aren't much of a threat except from actors who already have sufficient power to carry them out regardless of cert (e.g. your employer on your work machine, state actors).

As for those who wish to be sure they're talking to The Nybbler, why do they care? And if they do care, why should I care that they care?

To be honest the insistence on everything being TLS is completely unwarranted. Most sites don't need, and should not have, TLS encryption.

If you or the other party doesn't own every inch of infra between the two of you, it's necessary. The switch to ubiquitous encryption happened right around the time Comcast was starting to MITM most connections with tracking scripts, and it was only a matter of time until they started injecting ads. (Which is one reason existing players were so gung ho on encryption--can't have someone else cutting into that income stream.)

ubiquitous TLS + ESNI/ECH does make it harder to perform some forms of censorship. for example if someone controlling the network wants to ban you from a particular site hosted on cloudflare or another CDN then they will need to ban ESNI/ECH connections to the whole of the CDN. more people using TLS/etc increases the collateral damage from certain blocking technologies.

I don't agree. Knowing who you are talking to and that no third party is listening to your content is good.

I get the argument, I just disagree with it. I don't think most content is worthy of that level of protection.

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