On Mar 20, 2017 3:36 PM, "Vara La Fey" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
OMG!!
First of all, you'd be mis-educating them if telling them that
certificate "validity" has any real meaning. (But now you're
talking about http.)
I mean validity as in trusted roots that have been shipped with your
OS or browser. Surely you don't mean these are meaningless. AFAIK
they are very reliable as long as you never accept bogus certs. If
you accept bogus certs "all the time", I really hope you know what
you're doing. Pretty much any important site should have working SSL.
There is a reason why all the browsers freak out when you get a bad
cert, but users still click "add exception". My captive education
portal would give real consequence to this with the 3 minute power
point slideshow and mandatory quiz. I wonder if this is already
patented. . .
Second, why do you think you have any right to put speed bumps
in the way of people who are doing nothing to you?
Plenty of businesses do this already for captive portals and forcing
users to log in, pay, or accept an EULA. They are already tampering
with your SSL connection in order to redirect you to the portal. I'm
just suggesting to use this technology for "educational" purposes.
Third, if your grandmother needs internet "safety" education,
just educate her, or refuse to keep fixing the problems she
encounters in her ignorance - if she really is all that
ignorant. I hope you wouldn't install a browser re-direct
without her consent, because then you'd be just any other
malware propagator with just any other self-righteous
rationalization.
Well, I'm lazy. I'd much rather have an ongoing passive education
program for anyone that uses that router. Maybe only 1 in 1000
requests trigger the "test", or once a month per mac address maybe.
If grandma fails the test I can get an email so I can call her up
and gently chastise her. "Grandmaaaa, did you accept a bogus SSL
certificate again? Hmmm?"
As far as consent goes, I'm only talking about routers you own or
have permission to modify. That should go without saying.
Fourth, if /you /need educational "speed bumps" on /your
/router, /you /are free to have them. One of the great things
about freedom - from government or from meddling busybodies - is
that /you /get to be free too.
My post is in the context of businesses or individuals that provide
Internet to the public. Presumably businesses and individuals have
the freedom to do this kind of SSL interception, since they've
already been doing it for years without any repercussions.
Personally I'm disturbed that businesses will try to get me to
accept their SSL cert for their Wi-Fi portal, but I know the
technology leaves little choice. One trick is to ignore the cert and
try again with a non SSL address.
It is pretty ironic that the first thing these captive portals ask
users to do is blindly accept a bogus SSL cert. It is really just a
sad state of affairs that we are literally training people to accept
bad SSL certificates.
For years my Firefox has had an option to "always use HTTPS",
and I'm sure all other modern browsers do as well. Plus,
Mozilla.org <http://Mozilla.org> has a free plugin - I think
it's from EFF.org <http://EFF.org> - called "HTTPS Everywhere".
It's all very easy to use, and will be almost entirely
transparent to Grandma.
This won't do anything to protect you/grandma from bogus ssl certs.
Imagine connecting to a bad AP at Starbucks that is proxying all
your SSL connections. Your only defense is trusted roots and
knowing not to accept bogus SSL certs. If only we had a captive
router-based SSL education program... ;)
On 3/20/2017 3:14 PM, Brien Dieterle wrote:
A system like I described would just be an "educational tool"
to encourage people to use HTTPS (properly). It wouldn't stop
you from accepting bogus certificates-- just a speed bump. Now
that I've thought about it I'd really like to install something
like this on my grandparent's router. . . heck, my own
router. . .
On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 2:50 PM, Vara La Fey
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Oh HELL no!! What kind of hall-monitor nanny mentality do
you want people to adopt??
I accept "bogus" certificates all the time because the
whole idea of certificates is crap in the first place -
they are NOT maintained - and years ago I got tired of that
procedure warning me about "invalid" certificates for sites
that were perfectly valid.
I've never had a problem. Of course I'm also careful where
I go, certificate or not.
- Vara
On 3/20/2017 2:12 PM, Brien Dieterle wrote:
Maybe every commercial router should do SSL interception
by default. If a user accepts a bogus certificate they
are taken to a page that thoroughly scolds them and
informs them about the huge mistake they made, forces them
to read a few slides and take a quiz on network safety
before allowing them on the Internet. Maybe do the same
for non-ssl HTTP traffic, etc.. .
On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 1:55 PM, Matt Graham
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Victor Odhner
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I’m really annoyed that so many companies
offer open WIFI when it would be
so easy to secure those hot spots.
Restaurants, hotels, and the waiting
rooms of auto dealerships are almost 100% open.
[snip]
On 2017-03-20 13:20, Stephen Partington wrote:
This is usually done as a means to be easy for
their customers.
Pretty much this. Convenience is more valuable than
security in most people's minds.
they’d be happy to do the right thing if we
could explain it to the right people.
I'm not sure this would happen. Setting up passwords
and then distributing those passwords has a non-zero
cost and offers zero visible benefits for most of the
people who are using the wireless networks.[0] And as
another poster said, what about football/baseball
stadiums? Distributing passwords to tens of thousands
of people is sort of difficult. "Just watching the
game" is not an option; people want to FaceTweet
pictures of themselves at the game.
OTOH, the last time I looked at the access points
visible from my living room, almost all of them had
some sort of access control enabled. Maybe there's a
social convention forming that "my access point" ~=
"my back yard" and "open access point" ~= "a public park"?
[0] Having a more educated user population would make
the benefits more visible, but it's very difficult to
make people care about these things.
--
Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress
There is no Darkness in Eternity
But only Light too dim for us to see.
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