Hi Chris,

(also no hats)

thanks for the clarification.
If either "no-limit" and "hard-limit" would both be ok for you (and
others), then I would be strongly in favor of "no-limit".
(note: I recognise that the side effect of "no-limit" is that domain
squatters can brick a site for a longer time after the domain had been
handed over. But actually considering that we plan to do some
pre-caching deployment in browsers anyway, the browsers might also be
the solution for this problem. Like doing a "clear pin cache for domain
xyz" in case of really malicious pin bricking.)

Best regards, Tobias


On 29/05/13 06:16, Yoav Nir wrote:
> Hi Chris
>
> (again, no hats)
>
> On May 29, 2013, at 3:23 AM, Chris Palmer <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>> 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.
>> Yes. But, in this case, the choice is between status-quo HTTPS and
>> extra-happy pinned HTTPS. That's a very different proposition than
>> clearly-broken HTTPS vs. status-quo HTTPS, for example. Also, failing
>> closed would probably be a deal-breaker for deployment, at least at
>> this time. Finally, for sites that people use regularly — Facebook,
>> Gmail, Twitter — users will still get good protection. Arguably, these
>> are the sites that are mature and most likely to be able to deploy
>> pinning;
> People having multiple devices kind of screws this up. People may use the 
> same site every day, but they might not use the same site from the same 
> device every day. So if someone uses mostly a phone to access facebook, they 
> may go a whole month without accessing it from their desktop or laptop. 
> Limiting pins to 30 days means your less-used devices, which may be on a 
> totally different network than your phone, are not protected.
>
>> it's the banks and other occasionally-visited sites that
>> should probably stick to Report-Only mode anyway, because they are
>> less mature *as web technology companies*. Thus I would argue that, at
>> least for now, the sites that would most likely fail open due to limit
>> son the max-max-age are sites that should fail open anyway, for other
>> reasons.
> Disagree on that. Banks and other financial institutions are not web 
> technology companies, but they deal with real money and they have real money 
> with which to buy such expertise. It's no coincidence that banks were very 
> early adopters of anti-XSS and anti-CSRF measures, and it's no coincidence 
> that one of this group's biggest contributors works for Paypal, which is no 
> less a financial institution than any bank or credit card companies. If we 
> can't help protect the transactions that involve money, what's the point?
>
>> However, that's a bit of a tangent. As it is, many sites that really
>> need pinning protection can get it under this I-D, and others can gain
>> nice information from Report-Only mode, and others do no worse than
>> the status quo.
>>
>>> 2. as you seem to advocate a hard limit of 30 days.
>> Not exactly; I find Trevor's call for simple clarity compelling, but I
>> also like a browser-determined limit past which we fail open (for the
>> reasons described above). I could happily go either way, which doesn't
>> really help, I realize. :) Ryan and I can just make a call one way or
>> the other and write it up, is that OK?
> By "fail open", do you mean fail with a warning to the user, or just silently 
> ignore the pin?  If it's the latter, than letting each implementation choose 
> a max-max-age does not address Trevor's concerns. If some site sent a pin 
> with max-age of 10 years, they can fix the pin that they send, but they have 
> to assume that for the next 10 years some browsers out there have recorded 
> the way-too-long pin. Maybe this means that they can't switch root CAs. If 
> you set max-max-age in the RFC to 30 days, they can know that all those 
> browsers will have lost the pin after a month. If you let every UA choose 
> their own max-max-age, they have to assume the maximum, and hope that they 
> even know the maximum. They might think that taking the maximum among Chrome, 
> Firefox, IE, Safari and Opera gets them there. They might not have ever heard 
> of a browser called OmniWeb for Mac (just using an obscure one as an 
> example). But if OmniWeb sets no limits on pins and they change CAs after 1 
> year, they are going to get a whole bunch of support calls from people using 
> a browser they've never heard of.
>
> So I think we should either set no limits, or set hard limits.
>
>>> 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?
>> Right, exactly. I don't want to have browsers unilaterally leaking
>> information by proactively pre-scanning particular sites. However, an
>> oft-updated master list, like Chrome's CRLSets but for pins culled by
>> crawling sites and looking for pin updates, might be workable. But I'd
>> consider that a nice-to-have that is out of the I-D's immediate scope.
> I agree that we can't mandate that each UA has access to the results of some 
> web crawler looking for pins.
>
> Yoav


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