Re:Plaintext HTTP in a Modern World
by chrismorgan on Sunday July 10, 2022 @10:05AM
(#32044889)
Yes, there is a certain measure of trust going into parties like Let’s Encrypt, but I don’t think it’s as bad as you are saying.
• A CA can’t intercept anything based on your using them.
• A CA can refuse to issue a certificate for your site, but if this got out (which it would), it would significantly damage their reputation and I don’t think it will ever make sense for them to unless legally compelled. In that case, there are other providers, unless legal compulsion has removed them too, in which case the world wide web is dead anyway, so this is not worth worrying about.
• A CA can issue a false certificate for your site. There is, however, a non-trivial risk of them being detected in doing this (much smaller for small sites, but the system is set up in such a way that almost anyone can check and detect most instances, and I think you can be reasonably sure Let’s Encrypt specifically is being monitored for suspicious patterns by multiple parties that have vested interests in the system running smoothly), and if it did get detected, they would certainly be subjected to extreme scrutiny, so that any more instances would be very likely to be detected, and if a good explanation was not provided in short order (and even then it wouldn’t be too easy to recover), they would be dead, though it would certainly be a period of great pain for the web. In other words, not only does the potential upside of cheating go up, but also the downside.
I don’t think your conclusion that you should support HTTP is reasonable.
• A CA can’t intercept anything based on your using them.
• A CA can refuse to issue a certificate for your site, but if this got out (which it would), it would significantly damage their reputation and I don’t think it will ever make sense for them to unless legally compelled. In that case, there are other providers, unless legal compulsion has removed them too, in which case the world wide web is dead anyway, so this is not worth worrying about.
• A CA can issue a false certificate for your site. There is, however, a non-trivial risk of them being detected in doing this (much smaller for small sites, but the system is set up in such a way that almost anyone can check and detect most instances, and I think you can be reasonably sure Let’s Encrypt specifically is being monitored for suspicious patterns by multiple parties that have vested interests in the system running smoothly), and if it did get detected, they would certainly be subjected to extreme scrutiny, so that any more instances would be very likely to be detected, and if a good explanation was not provided in short order (and even then it wouldn’t be too easy to recover), they would be dead, though it would certainly be a period of great pain for the web. In other words, not only does the potential upside of cheating go up, but also the downside.
I don’t think your conclusion that you should support HTTP is reasonable.