Hello Michael,
Hi,
On Fri, 2017-09-15 at 22:26 +0200, Peter Müller wrote:
Hello Michael, hello Matthias,
a few thoughts on this from me:
(1) @Michael: Thank you for having a look at this. In my opinion, enabling HTTPS on all *.ipfire.org sites by default would be a huge security benefit.
Of course, this needs time and testing, so no pressure. :-)
Especially on download sites HTTPS would be nice in case someone verifies the downloaded ISO - when transmitted in plaintext, both image and checksum might be modified by a MITM.
Further, there is still SHA1 in use on http://download.ipfire.org/, but that is another issue.
Indeed it is. We have ticket for that: https://bugzilla.ipfire.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11345
Thanks for the ticket link.
(2) Speaking about the CAs: I do not know what opinion to have here.
On the one hand, using your own project CA is good since nobody except the visitors has to rely on some external certificate signing company.
Agreed. I do not trust any of those public CAs - at all. They have a commercial interest and that is it.
Publishing the TLSA-records tells everyone that this CA - which is untrusted by all current browsers - is legitimate on *.ipfire.org.
We do this.
I forgot that. Unfortunately, at the moment, "only" mail servers benefit from this (see below).
On the other hand, there are two points against it: (a) Nobody actually uses TLSA/DANE for validating web site certificates (this is different when it comes to SMTP). So, nearly every user will see a certificate warning.
Indeed not a single browser is verifying it. There is plugins that can show an icon and that's it.
We also do this for our mail server which does not have a publicly signed certificate.
As far as I am concerned, there are two different approaches to TLS:
(a) If you are running a mail server, TLS is mostly used in opportunistic mode, and certificates are not that important. The idea behind this is to prevent plaintext transport of e-mails, that's why so many big MX still support weak ciphers such as 3DES. (Personally, I am not a fan of opportunistic TLS since it only protects against passive attackers and one has to use ancient algorithms. At least RC4-MD5 finally disappeared...)
So, a self-signed certificate for a MX is no problem - at least, not a big one. Only a few MX actually ask for a client certificate, and even less systems are configured to present any.
(b) Web browsers have a completely different view on this: They first check the certificate against the DNS name, and if they match, encryption can be started. On the other hand, in case they see an untrusted certificate for whatever reason, everything becomes bad very quickly.
Integrity is much more important here in order to protect the users against active (MITM) attackers.
Because of this, I would prefer certs signed by well-known CAs for public web sites.
Personally, i suppose DANE will never be implemented in web browsers. There are too many collisions with the systems DNS service, and network stacks, and the network's firewall rules, and so on. Sad, but that is what we (do not) have.
I am not convinced that this has technical reasons. It just puts some big businesses will lose a machine that prints them money.
Partly I think. DANE depends on DNSSEC, and I remember some user complaints that their ISPs filter DNS queries to external name servers without using it on their own systems.
Nobody there is interested in the security. They are interested in the money.
Without being very deep into this, I assume you are right.
So, enabling HTTPS on all or at least some very important IPFire sites will cause more user complaints.
Indeed. That is why we don't enforce it.
Further, and that is a _very_ big problem in my eyes, it actually decreases transport encryption security: Every time a user accesses *.ipfire.org, he/she/it has to bypass a certificate warning - at least in FF, there is no easy way to store the exception permanently.
In case a MITM injects his own certificate to break TLS, the user will see a certificate warning which is nearly identical to those shown usually for IPFire's CA. And the user will mostly bypass this - very well-known - warning, an the attacker won.
To prevent this, you MUST check the certificates checksum against the value you know is legitimate. Every time.
Nobody will do so.
Agreed.
(b) As I mentioned above, I completely understand your point having an own CA. However, I do not think this is so important for public web services:
I emphasise here on "web services". I am not even sure if Let's Encrypt can issue certificates for our internal LDAP server or our mail server, etc.
This depends on the actual network (especially DNS) configuration. If the server does not have a public IP, but is configured in the DNS, LE can validate it without a direct connection: - https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/cert-for-intranet/6337/4 - https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/on-the-state-of-the-dns-01-challenge/480...
As far as I am concerned, there is no "trust" in case of CA companies. Some of them showed a really unprofessional behaviour (DigiNotar, WoSign, Symantec, ...) and are/were either kicked off business by their customers or the web browser developers.
So why would we assume that Let's Encrypt is doing a better job? Just because they are sponsored by some of the "good guys"?
You only "trust" a CA to validate if a certain domain really belongs to the person who claims so.
In case there is a certificate in use signed by a foreign CA, what should happen? Nobody except the server admin has the private key, and there are many techniques to prevent modern browsers accepting any certificate for your domain, such as:
So let's split all of this:
- DANE/TLSA (specifies which certificate [chain] is valid)
We can just install that for the Let's Encrypt CA. It doesn't make sense to have TLSA records for each cert because they will be replaced very very quickly.
I remember a trick here: If you do not rotate the private key every time LE's signature expires, the public one also stays the same - and the TLSA record does not need to be changed.
Can't find the link right now...
- CAA (DNS record, rather new, specifies which CAs can issue
certificates for this site, might be supported by common browsers some day)
I need to implement that in our DNS server software, but that is not a big thing. Will do that soon.
Thanks.
- HSTS (preventing a MITM from downgrading to plaintext)
Who wants to take care of this?
Actually, HSTS is quite easy to deploy since it only tells web browsers to enforce TLS on a certain site. So, if there are no dependencies (unencrypted external resources, ad servers, ...), you can just set it up and forget it. :-)
- HPKP (as DANE, but supported by modern browsers, TOFU
[Trust On First Use] = first connection must be clean)
Same.
Indeed, HPKP is more complicated, it is like DANE without DNS. Further, some security experts (such as Ivan Ristic) argue that it might become dangerous in case of misconfiguration.
And who would like to create tickets on BZ for all of this?
Except from going out of business, I do not see any risk for a web site owner here. That is, in case all or some of the mentioned methods are implemented.
LOL, we are not a business. We are an Open Source project.
"Going out of business" was relating to CAs, not to IPFire. But yes, it would be very sad if this project disappears.
Let's Encrypt (LE) seems to be different from other CAs since they use standardised methods and act quite transparently. Further, there are some "major players" behind it (Mozilla, EFF, ...) which have a good reputation. This - hopefully - means that there will be no security breaches like in case of DigiNotar.
I don't share your hope, but I do not want to fight this. I have been trialing Let's Encrypt a little bit on some web shops and other things and it does the job. To be honest I do not see the point in spending the money on a different vendor of certificates. So take that as: They are not worse than those.
I don't want to fight either; but I am afraid I did not fully understand your point concerning the trust/distrust of public CAs (except for obvious reasons like security breaches).
To come to an end, using LE as a CA for *.ipfire.org will not harm the security of IPFire significantly. It reduces browser alerts and a possible security threat (see above), making it easier to deploy HTTPS.
Let's do it then.
All right. :-)
I need some support here, because I am running out of time.
Which web server are you running? At the moment, I am only using Apache and could provide some support here.
Best regards, Peter Müller
Needless to say, DANE/HSTS/CAA are obligatory.
Best regards, Peter Müller
-Michael