The certificate warning paradigm is over blown given that the typical 
alternative is no TLS. An unauthenticated TLS connection is practically 
speaking, no different to no TLS at all. The same of true when you see 
certificate warring messages  S/MIME messages when the rest of the inbox is 
unsigned email. As long as the two cases are treated equal why cannot you 
dispense with the certificate warning messages?

 

From: perpass [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Richard Barnes
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2014 3:47 PM
To: Michael Richardson
Cc: perpass
Subject: Re: [perpass] EFF, Mozilla et al. announce new free certificate 
authority...

 

 

 

On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 1:42 PM, Michael Richardson <[email protected]> 
wrote:


Richard Barnes <[email protected]> wrote:
    >> I don't think this is is this going to help eliminate the invalid
    >> certificates that seem inevitable from things like ILOMs/iDRAC/etc. 
because
    >> the https interface to the service processor never knows what zone it 
will
    >> use.     I'd love to find a way for such appliance uses of HTTPS to come
    >> up secure in some way.
    >>

    > I would be interested in that as well, since those things are a major
    > source of cert validation bugs.  Any ideas for what the authentication
    > would be?  Or maybe there's no meaningful authentication here, and it's a
    > use case for HTTP over unauthenticated TLS.

I agree that given what we have here, HTTP over unauthenticated TLS (with
TOFU, ideally) would be significant better than training IT managers to click
through the warning.  I think that we should have, as a goal, elimination of
the click through certificate warning... nobody should ever do that.

In the case of an ILOM, we can't predict a name or an IP address which the
device can claim... but, the manufacturer usually has a MAC address, Asset
Tag, or other identifier which is often unique.  If only *THAT* could go into
the Location Bar instead of the IP address.  Yes, this is user interface
thing... sorta.. it's really about a different kind of URI.

 

We do have some history of putting identifiers besides domain names in the URL 
bar.  Namely with EV certs, browsers typically display the authenticated owner 
name.

 

So the real question is whether it's possible to make a PKI that can 
authenticate those identifiers.  We would of course need some new types for 
subjectAltName, but that's just more OIDs.  The more interesting question is 
how the PKI would be structured -- who are the trusted authorities for asset 
tags?

--Richard


 


--
Michael Richardson <[email protected] <mailto:mcr%[email protected]> >, 
Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-





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