Comment by tatterdemalion
11 years ago
The warning pages are really ridiculous. Why doesn't every HTTP page show a warning you have to click through?
But it's not like MITM attacks are not real. CAs don't realistically do a thing about them, but it is true that you can't trust that your connection is private based on TLS alone. (unless you're doing certificate pinning or you have some other solution).
You're absolutely right. From first principles, HTTP should have a louder warning than self-signed HTTPS.
Our hope is that Let's Encrypt will reduce the barriers to CA-signed HTTPS sufficiently, that it will become realistic for browsers to show warning indicators on HTTP.
If they did that today, millions of sites would complain, "why are you forcing us to pay money to CAs, and deal with the incredible headache of cert installation and management?". With Let's Encrypt, the browsers can point to a simple, single-command solution.
Thanks for doing this. It's really great and its something that clearly needs to happen.
The next step will be to replace the CA system with something actually secure, but that comes after we move the web to a place where most websites are at least trying.
We'll be in a position to deploy defenses like pinning (http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-websec-key-pinning-21.txt) for site operators who want more protection against the structural problems of the CA system. That will need to be implemented with care, but it should be possible.
Because HTTP does not imply security, HTTPS does. Without proper certificates, these guarantees are diluted; hence the warnings.
Why doesn't every HTTP page show a warning you have to click through?
Back in the Netscape days, it did. People got tired of clicking OK every time they searched for something.
Eventually maybe the browsers will do that. Currently far too many websites are HTTP-only to allow for that behavior, but if that changes and the vast majority of the web is over SSL it would make sense to start warning for HTTP connections. That would further reduce the practicality of SSL stripping attacks.