<hat="individual">
I agree with Yoav's comment.

Am not 100% sure on this, as I don't know the frequency of
"self-bricking" due to the reasons described by Trevor, but feel that 30
days is too short for protection of rare use users. Don't forget, we
have not solved the boot-strapping issue for HSTS and HKPK. So if the
max-age is too low, we basically leave all infrequent users unprotected.
(and I guess there are quite a number of important sites that people
would only go to only once in a while but not for sure every 30 days).

If I would have to balance between "self-inflicted bricking" (due to
mis-config, bad business deals, weak security, etc.) and user
protection, my vote would go for user protection.

So if we need a max-age, I would probably prefer a longer time, e.g. a
max-age of 1 year.

Best regards, Tobias



On 23/03/13 10:13, Yoav Nir wrote:
> 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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