On Mar 22, 2013, at 7:36 PM, Joseph Bonneau <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 7:07 PM, Trevor Perrin <[email protected]> wrote:
>> With a spec maximum (say 30 days), then you have a clear reference
>> point to plan around.
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> I have some stats I've been looking at from Google's web crawls about
> HSTS headers. Out of 12853 hosts I observed setting HSTS, 53% set of a
> max-age of 1 year. After that it's 15% 30 days, 12% 180 days, 10% 1
> day, and a smattering of other choices (with a few large hosts like
> Twitter setting very long-lived max-age).

As Ekr said in the meeting, there is a big difference here between HSTS and 
HPKP. It doesn't matter if Paypal or some bank advertises HSTS for a million 
years. It's not likely that someone who has declared a policy for always using 
secure transport will suddenly switch to non-secure transport. They might stop 
advertising HSTS, but they're not likely to stop insisting on TLS use.

OTOH a particular public key might be replaced because of switching certificate 
vendors, because auditors don't like that key length any more, or because your 
certificate vendor has decided that ECC is the way to go. Pinning something 
that has an expiry date for an unlimited time could be a problem.

Something to consider is that if the max-age time is shorter than the time 
between accesses to the site, the security of this mechanism is lost. If either 
the draft or the UA sets an upper limit of 30 days, then HKPK won't work for 
pub.ietf.org. This is a site that I only use from one week before an IETF 
meeting to one week following it. In between there are a little over three 
months where I don't use the site at all. So it would make sense for the site 
operator to set a max-age of 4 months. That limit may be inappropriate for web 
mail or social media, but even those might be accessed from different UAs at 
different times. For example, I might use my home computer for a social media 
site while I'm at home, but use a smart phone or a laptop for the same site 
when I'm away from home. 

I understand Trevor's issue. Does it make a difference to a site operator 
whether the site is partially bricked by bad pins for 30 days or 365 days?

Yoav

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