On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Ben Laurie <[email protected]> wrote: > On 25 July 2013 11:22, Nick <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 11:19:22AM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote: > >> (See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergence_(SSL) ) > > > > Would Convergence help here? I can't see how. If a government > > secretly aquired the SSL private keys for a site, and the site > > continued using them, then no convergence notary would know any > > cause not to vouch for the key. > > What helps here is perfect forward secrecy. >
It's worth remembering that SSL is primarily used as a means of protecting data in transit, not data at rest; PFS doesn't help for the latter because SSL-encrypted traffic is decrypted before it gets stored on a company's servers (in order to be useful for queries and such). I had difficulty finding information about company policies for protecting data at rest, but anecdotally, they seem to mostly vary from "stored in plaintext in a password-protected database" to "stored in plaintext in a password-protected database behind a firewall." In other words, even with PFS-supporting SSL, there is still a centralized and persistent attack point for user data. My intuition is that if PFS becomes more popular, federal agencies will simply shift resources to obtaining access to data at rest. (I wrote about this in more detail here<http://zyan.scripts.mit.edu/blog/some-thoughts-on-facebook-implementing-forward-secrecy/>in response to the announcement of Facebook implementing PFS.) Dialogue and links suggesting otherwise would be much appreciated. -Yan PS: Does anyone actively use convergence? The original repository hasn't been updated in a year. I installed a patched version of it in the latest FF from Github and immediately had to open this ticket<https://github.com/moxie0/Convergence/issues/176>. > > BTW, better alternative to Convergence: Certificate Transparency - > http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6962. > -- > Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by > emailing moderator at [email protected] or changing your settings at > https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech > -- Yan Zhu http://web.mit.edu/zyan/www/
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