Comment by ElectricalUnion
17 days ago
Either you really are secure, or ideally you should not be able to even pretend you are secure. Allowing "pretend it's secure" downgrades the security in all contexts.
IMHO they should gradually lock all dynamic code execution such as dynamic CSS and javascript behind a explicit toggle for insecure http sites.
> It massively undermines the security of connections to local devices
No, you see the prompt, it is insecure. If the network admin wants it secure, it means either a internal CA, or a literally free cert from let's encrypt. As the network admin did not care, it's insecure.
"but I have legacy garbage with hardcoded self-signed certs" then reverse proxy that legacy garbage with Caddy?
I'm talking about situations where you have nontechnical users that need to connect to the device, neither the client nor the device have necessarily an internet connection, and the connection is often via a local IP address. None of your proposed solutions are appropriate for that situation. And basically all I'm asking is that the connection be at least encrypted (meaning that eavesdropping is not enough: you need to construct a man in the middle), even if it's not presented to the user as secure.
(An option to get some authentication, and one that I think chrome have kind of started to figure out, is to allow a PWA to connect to a local device and authenticate with its own keys. This still means you need to connect to the internet once with the client device, but at least from that point onwards it can work without internet. But then you need to have a whole other flow so that random sites can't just connect to your local devices...)
How often are you offline like that but on a network you can trust isn’t malicious? If I’m at home, my printer is more protected from eavesdropping by the WiFi password than a self-signed certificate. If I’m at the coffee shop, it’s insecure because I can’t trust the dozens of other people not to be malicious or compromised, and the answer is to clearly tell me that it’s unsafe.
You could be in any of those situations, is my point. I fail to see any situation where some encryption is worse than no encryption.