Eddy Nigg wrote: > On 02/09/2012 12:18 AM, From Nelson B Bolyard: > BTW, this proposal wouldn't be a problem if it would cover, lets say > the top 500 sites and leave the rest to the CAs. There would be > probably also the highest gains.
Effectively, we would be making the most popular servers on the internet faster, and giving them a significant competitive advantage over less popular servers. I am not sure this is compatible with Mozilla's positions on net neutrality and related issues. AFAICT, improving the situation for the top 500 sites (only) would be the argument for *mandatory* OCSP stapling and against implementing Google's mechanism. The 500 biggest sites on the internet all have plenty of resources to figure out how to deploy OCSP stapling. The issue with OCSP stapling is the long tail of websites, that don't have dedicated teams of sysadmins to very carefully change the firewall rules to allow outbound connections from some servers (where previously they did not need to) and/or implement deploy DNS resolvers on their servers (where, previously, they might not have needed any), and/or upgrade and configure their web server to support OCSP stapling (which is a bleeding edge feature and/or not available, depending on the server product). A better (than "favor the Alexa 500") solution may be to do auto-load CRLs for the sub-CA that handles EV roots (assuming that CAs that do EV have or could create sub-CAs for EV roots for which there would be very few revocations, which may require standardizing some of the business-level decision making regarding when/why certificates can be revoked), or similar things. This would at least reduce the cost for the long tail of websites to a low* fixed yearly fee. I am not sure this would be completely realistic or sufficient though. I am also concerned about the filtering based on reason codes. Is it realistic to expect that every site that has a key compromise to publicly state that fact? Isn't it pretty likely that after a server's EE certificate has been revoked, that people will tend to be less diligent about protecting the private key and/or asking for the cert to be revoked with a new reason code? However, I don't think we should reject Google's improvement here because it isn't perfect. OCSP fetching is frankly a stupid idea, and AFAICT, we're all doing it mostly because everybody else is doing it and we don't want to look less secure. In the end, for anything serious, we have been relying (and continue to rely) on browser updates to *really* protect users from certificate-related problems. And, often we're making almost arbitrary decisions as to which breaches of which websites are worth issuing a browser update for. Google is just improving on that. Props to Adam, Ben, Wan-Teh, Ryan, and other people involved. Cheers, Brian * Yes, I consider the price of even EV certificates to be almost inconsequential, compared to the overall (opportunity) cost of a person needed to securely set up and maintain even the most basic HTTPS server. -- dev-tech-crypto mailing list dev-tech-crypto@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-crypto