Re:You have a moral obligation to use crypto
by pdkl95 on Wednesday February 12, 2014 @12:49PM
(#7225905)
This is claimed every time the topic is brought up, and like the self-signed certificate scare-box in firefox, it does a significant amount of harm by forcing a choice between all or nothing. Which means many times, "nothing" will be chosen.
Encryption without authentication is still incredibly useful, and something that we've NEEDED to have happen pretty much everywhere. Some of the benefits are:
1) The ccost of and attack is significantly larger, by protecting against passive eavesdropping. You can capture massive numbers of passwords trivially by simply logging and unencrypted stream, but full MitM requires more time, effort, and resources to accomplish.
2) MitM attacks can sometimes be detected, either at the time of the attack or in the future due to repeated opportunities for the attack discovered. A passive scanner is impossible to discover, in most cases.
3) Any use encourages a culture of encryption, so the people who ARE authenticating properly aren't as obvious.
4) The cost of moving from a self-signed key to one signed by a 3rd party is small ("get your cert signed"). This makes the upgrade path to full, properly authenticated crypto much smaller.
All of these benefits are worthwhile, so please, stop encouraging the use of plaintext. The proper way of handling this is not to scare people away like Firefox currently does, but to encrypt everything automagically, so it works just like unencrypted HTTP, and only show the lock icon if full authentication has happened. That is, encrypting without auth should be used, but still presented to the user as a plain, unencrypted page.
Encryption without authentication is still incredibly useful, and something that we've NEEDED to have happen pretty much everywhere. Some of the benefits are:
1) The ccost of and attack is significantly larger, by protecting against passive eavesdropping. You can capture massive numbers of passwords trivially by simply logging and unencrypted stream, but full MitM requires more time, effort, and resources to accomplish.
2) MitM attacks can sometimes be detected, either at the time of the attack or in the future due to repeated opportunities for the attack discovered. A passive scanner is impossible to discover, in most cases.
3) Any use encourages a culture of encryption, so the people who ARE authenticating properly aren't as obvious.
4) The cost of moving from a self-signed key to one signed by a 3rd party is small ("get your cert signed"). This makes the upgrade path to full, properly authenticated crypto much smaller.
All of these benefits are worthwhile, so please, stop encouraging the use of plaintext. The proper way of handling this is not to scare people away like Firefox currently does, but to encrypt everything automagically, so it works just like unencrypted HTTP, and only show the lock icon if full authentication has happened. That is, encrypting without auth should be used, but still presented to the user as a plain, unencrypted page.