News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by solatic on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @02:40AM (#14750591)
If you're in a corporate intranet environment, you ought to have an intranet CA, as well as the means to distribute the CA's certificates securely to all deployed machines within the intranet.
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by tajen on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @03:40AM (#14750817)
I dislike intranet CAs because they allow your company to intercept and play MITM with every other website you visit (except for certificate-pinned websites)...

I'd prefer that Chrome write "insecure" if there's a non-public CA in your chain.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by solatic on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @11:34AM (#14753407)
Not trusting intranet CAs is irrational.

1) Every employee of every company needs to have some level of trust in their company. They trust their company to make payroll, and they trust their company at a reasonably high level to follow local laws and regulations, including reporting threats and violations against their physical safety. That doesn't mean that employees should trust their employers with their deepest darkest secrets and life savings, or that there aren't different types of trust, just that trust is a spectrum, and arguing that you should fully trust every one of the shadowy public CAs pre-installed in your OS and browser, that you know absolutely nothing about and have not personally vetted nor have personal relationships with, but not the intranet CA your employer operates, is rather clearly an irrational assertion.

2) If you decide not to trust your employer's CA, and your employer has provided you with a machine to access intranet sites, then you clearly cannot trust accessing Internet sites for personal reasons on your employer-provided device, not because the CA cannot be trusted but because it's irrational to distrust the CA but also trust the employer-provided device, which may have a keylogger and other tracking software installed.

3) If you decide not to trust your employer's CA and your employer operates a BYOD environment, then you are free to bring a separate device for work purposes, on which you trust your employer's CA but refrain from accessing personal accounts, instead only accessing personal accounts on devices which your employer doesn't know about.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @05:47AM (#14751255)
If it's a company issued device, then play by their rules.

If it's BYOD, then create a new user account / profile for work. We're not running DOS anymore.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by phlo on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @07:29AM (#14751606)
Minor nitpick regarding the "except for certificate-pinned websites" part:

HPKP does not validate pins if they resolve to a user-installed trust anchor like an intranet CA. The RFC [1] leaves behavior undefined (see Section 2.4), and I'm not aware of any popular implementation that would honor the pin in case of a user-installed certificate.

This can be incredibly frustrating if you're trying to protect against MITM attacks; but at the same time, I can follow the browser developers' line of thought that goes "if we were to enforce it, users would just jump ship to the next available browser".

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7469

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by cesarb on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @10:07AM (#14752600)
At least on firefox, this can be changed through the preference security.cert_pinning.enforcement_level (see https://wiki.mozilla.org/SecurityEngineering/Public_Key_Pinn...).
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by bjpbakker on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @03:49AM (#14750856)
It depends on what they're used for but I agree that many companies seem to spy on their employees this way.

Commonly I only allow internal CAs for specific internal websites and not allow them to MITM just any website. On occasion this meant not being able to use the company's wifi and deal with 4g instead.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by tempay on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @03:16AM (#14750723)
That's okay unless you allow users to bring there own devices, then you have users which are taught to bypass certificate errors on a daily basis.
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by bjpbakker on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @03:46AM (#14750844)
Sorry but I have to call BS on that. I always bring my own device and never have bypassed certificate errors. A company will either have certificates for their own apps (commonly running on specific subdomains of their own domain) or have their own internal CA that you can trust on your own device.

Certificate errors on "internal" web apps are just as bad as on the rest of the internet.

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by wfunction on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @03:49AM (#14750854)
If you trust a company's internal CA then aren't you trusting them to issue certificates for every website and not just their own? Isn't that dangerous?
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by bjpbakker on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @04:22AM (#14750967)
Yes absolutely.

If I have to I trust the company's CA in a special browser profile that I only use for working with their internal tools.

For just a few tools it's often simpler to just trust those specific certificates, though

Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by ewanm89 on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @08:50AM (#14752036)
All browsers can tell you what certificate signed the one in use. Unfortunately a recent chrome UI change made this a pain to get to.in chrome, into the other browsers just clicking on the lock in the address bar, it soon becomes obvious if the company is mitm all SSL connections.
Re:Life Is About to Get Harder for Websites Without HTTPS by wfunction on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @08:57AM (#14752079)
Because a normal person will "just click the lock in the address bar" on every single HTTPS website he visits to make sure his company isn't MITMing him, right?