Hi Chris,

<hat="individual">

It seems like the majority of the WG would not share my concerns. So I
will shut up soon. ;-)

Maybe two remarks:
1. user choice is a bad idea when it comes to security.
Just remember the many SSL cert "click to proceed anyway pop-up
windows/issues..."
In most cases the user is not qualified to fully understand the
consequences of his choice. And also if he is faced with the choice "no
access" or "access", he/she will probably go for "access anyway". We
have trained them that way the last few years.
So I rather want to avoid a user choice as much as possible.

2. as you seem to advocate a hard limit of 30 days. Could you think of
browsers refreshing their PINs before expiry automatically? (i.e.
without the user actually visiting the site?)
And question to all: would this open Pandora's box in terms of privacy
etc. as we would leak the list of pinned sites to servers in the middle?

Best regards, Tobias



On 23/05/13 01:14, Chris Palmer wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Looks like these are the options:
>
> 1. No hard limits, but allow UAs to limit the pin time. Suggest a month
>
> 2. Set a hard limit of one month in the RFC. Longer pins are truncated.
>
> 3. No hard limits, but allow the UA to skip hard-fail if a pin hasn't
> been observed for some time (like a month)
>
> 4. Adopt some gradual confidence-building scheme a-la-TACK.
>
> 5. No hard limits, leave limiting the pin time unspecified, make no
> suggestion.
>
> (4) is a key differentiator for TACK, and I want to let TACK be TACK
> and HPKP be HPKP. I consider both to be experimental features, and
> having two very different proposals maximizes our experimentation
> coverage.
>
> Any of (1, 2, 3, 5) is more or less fine by me; I'll go along with the
> consensus. I see them as being on a spectrum of "fixity" or "definedness":
>
> least fixed . . . most fixed
> 5        3        1        2
>
> Perhaps in this time of experimentation, less fixed is better. Maybe
> we can learn more about how well/not well pinning works, and then
> publish a new version of the specification in the future.
>
> I posit that browsers will have strong incentives to fail open after
> some reasonable max-max-age, even if the spec does not mandate it.
> (For example, Chrome stops enforcing pinning completely if it
> recognizes that its own build date is more than 10 weeks in the past:
> a browser that old is definitely an indicator of some kind of problem,
> and we want users to be able to recover.) So, not mandating a limit is
> not as dangerous as it may seem, as a practical matter.
>
> However, Trevor compellingly argues: """Anyways, I think making things
> safe and simple for site operators is more important than browser
> creativity, or trying to maximize pinning's security benefits.  That's
> why I still prefer a spec-mandated limit. And I think 30 days strikes
> a good balance between security benefits and safety, and is easy to
> remember and explain."""
>
> I am less compelled by the argument that rarely-visited sites will get
> no protection from pinning if the max-max-age is as low as 30 days, if
> the fail-open behavior is to provide the user a warning/notice/choice:
>
>     Hey, you haven't visited yourbank.com <http://yourbank.com>
> recently enough for us to be highly
>     confident that it's the real yourbank.com <http://yourbank.com>.
> Everything else checks out, so
>     we still have good confidence.
>
>     [ I'm OK with good confidence, proceed anyway ]        [ Oops, go
> back ]
>
> So, my vote is for (3).
>
>
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