[liberationtech] self signing certs by default

[Lucas Gonze]

The MITM is much more expensive, so would make it unfeasible to maintain
current levels of surveillance.

The MITM can't be done in secrecy. The client can publish the certificate
that it received. This would force the surveillance apparatus to reveal
itself.


On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 2:45 PM, John Adams <jna at retina.net> wrote:

> You misunderstand the signing practice if you think this is a good idea.
>
> Granted, it provides a low level of encryption for clients but it does not
> provide Non-repudiability to those users, opening them up to MitM attacks.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Mar 14, 2014, at 16:35, Guido Witmond <guido at witmond.nl> wrote:
> >
> >> On 03/14/14 19:56, Julian Oliver wrote:
> >> ..on Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 10:46:30AM -0700, Lucas Gonze wrote:
> >>> Let's say web servers auto generated self-signed certificates for any
> >>> domain that didn't supply its own certificate, likely one from an
> authority.
> >>>
> >>> What that would accomplish is to make the stream unreadable over the
> wire,
> >>> unless the attacker was willing and able to do an MITM with their own
> auto
> >>> generated self-signed certificate.
> >>>
> >>> It would not be hard to do that MITM, but it would be orders of
> magnitude
> >>> more expensive than copying unencrypted bytes off the router. It would
> not
> >>> be practical to do the MITM against a large portion of traffic. The
> >>> attacker would have to pick their targets.
> >>
> >>>
> >>> Thoughts?
> >
> >>
> >> It would be good if Debian and other popular GNU/Linux LAMP
> distributions made
> >> OpenSSL/TLS key generation (and set up of a VirtualHost template for
> :443) an
> >> encouraged option during an Apache installation (OpenSSL is a dependency
> >> anyway). It could be a simple walkthrough with Qs for CN and admin
> email,
> >> abstracting over the classic and ungainly:
> >>
> >>    openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -nodes -out
> /etc/ssl/localcerts/apache.pem -keyout /etc/ssl/localcerts/apache.key
> >
> > One could also automatically derive the DNSSEC-DANE TLSA record from
> > that server certificate and mail it to the sysadmin. Include a paragraph
> > that explains that by publishing that record, the site has stronger
> > protections against MitM-attacks than possible with CA-bought
> certificates.
> >
> > (the downside is that user need to install the Extended-DNSSEC-Validator
> > plug in).
> >
> >
> >
> > Regards, Guido.
> >
> > --
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