Why I no longer have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site
rachelbythebay.com409 points by mcbain 10 months ago
409 points by mcbain 10 months ago
> So, yes, instead of saying that "e" equals "65537", you're saying that "e" equals "AQAB". Aren't you glad you did those extra steps?
Oh JSON.
For those unfamiliar with the reason here, it’s that JSON parsers cannot be relied upon to treat numbers properly. Is 4723476276172647362476274672164762476438 a valid JSON number? Yes, of course it is. What will a JSON parser due with it? Silently truncate it to a 64-bit or 63-bit integer, or a float, probably or if you’re very lucky emit an error (a good JSON decoder written in a sane language like Common Lisp would of course just return the number, but few of us are so lucky).
So the only way to reliably get large integers into and out of JSON is to encode them as something else. Base64-encoded big-endian bytes is not a terrible choice. Silently doing the wrong thing is the root of many security errors, so it not wrong to treat every number in the protocol this way. Of course, then one loses the readability of JSON.
JSON is better than XML, but it really isn’t great. Canonical S-expressions would have been far preferable, but for whatever reason the world didn’t go that way.
> Canonical S-expressions would have been far preferable, but for whatever reason the world didn’t go that way.
I feel like not understanding why JSON won out is being intentionally obtuse. JSON can easily be hand written, edited, and read for most data. Canonical S-expressions are not as easy to read and much harder to write by hand; having to prefix every atom with a length makes is very tedious to write by hand. If you have a JSON object you want to hand edit, you can just type... for an Canonical S-expression, you have to count how many characters you are typing/deleting, and then update the prefix.
You might not think the ability to hand generate, read, and edit is important, but I am pretty sure that is a big reason JSON has won in the end.
Oh, and the Ruby JSON parser handles that large number just fine.
> I feel like not understanding why JSON won out is being intentionally obtuse. JSON can easily be hand written, edited, and read for most data.
You are going way out of your way to try to come up with ways to rationalize why JSON was a success. The ugly truth is far simpler than what you're trying to sell: it was valid JavaScript. JavaScript WebApps could parse JSON with a call to eval(). No deserialization madness like XML, no need to import a parser. Just fetch a file, pass it to eval(), and you're done.
In other words, the thing that made JSON initially succeed was also a giant security hole
> In other words, the thing that made JSON initially succeed was also a giant security hole
Perhaps, but it's not a major concern when you control both the JavaScript frontend and whatever backend it consumes. In fact, arguably this technique is still pretty much in use today with the way WebApps get a hold of CSRF tokens. In this scenario security is a lesser concern than, say, input validation.
But also, all the other reasons written by the person you replied to
> But also, all the other reasons written by the person you replied to
Not really. JSON's mass adoption is tied to JavaScript's mass adoption, where sheer convenience and practicality dictates it's whole history most of the current state. Sending JavaScript fragments from the backend is a technique that didn't really stopped being used just because someone rolled out a JSON parser.
I think some people feel compelled to retroactively make this whole thing more refined and elegant because for some the ugly truth is hard to swallow.
The entire reason ACME exists is because you are never writing or reading the CSR by hand.
So of course, ACME is based around a format whose entire reason d'etre is being written and read by hand.
It's weird.
The reason json is a good format for ACME isn't that it is easy to read and write by hand[1], but that most languages have at least one decent json implementation available, so it is easier to implement clients in many different languages.
[1]: although being easy to read by humans is an advantage when debugging why something isn't working.
> I feel like not understanding why JSON won out is being intentionally obtuse.
I didn’t feel like my comment was the right place to shill for an alternative, but rather to complain about JSON. But since you raise it.
> JSON can easily be hand written, edited, and read for most data.
So can canonical S-expressions!
> Canonical S-expressions are not as easy to read and much harder to write by hand; having to prefix every atom with a length makes is very tedious to write by hand.
Which is why the advanced representation exists. I contend that this:
(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed
(detail "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected")
(subproblems ((urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed
(detail "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"")
(identifier (dns _example.org)))
(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier
(detail "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"")
(identifier (dns example.net))))))
{
"type": "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed",
"detail": "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected",
"subproblems": [
{
"type": "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed",
"detail": "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"",
"identifier": {
"type": "dns",
"value": "_example.org"
}
},
{
"type": "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier",
"detail": "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"",
"identifier": {
"type": "dns",
"value": "example.net"
}
}
]
}
As you can see, no you do not.
Your example uses s-expressions, not canonical s-expressions. Canonical s expressions[1] is basically a binary format. Each atom/string is prefixed by a decimal length of the string and a colon. It's advantage over regular s expressions is that there is no need to escape or quote strings with whitespace, and there is only a single possible representation for a given data structure. The disadvantage is it is much harder to write and read by humans.
As for s-expressions vs json, there are pros and cons to each. S-expressions don't have any way to encode type information in the data itself, you need a schema to know if a certain value should be treated as a number or a string. And it's subjective which is more readable.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_S-expressions
> Your example uses s-expressions, not canonical s-expressions.
I’ve always used ‘canonical S-expressions’ to refer to Rivest’s S-expressions proposal: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-rivest-sexp-13.html, a proposal which has canonical, basic transport & advanced transport representations which are all equivalent to one another (i.e., every advanced transport representation has a single canonical representation). I don’t know where I first saw it, but perhaps it was intended to distinguish from other S-expressions such as Lisp’s or Scheme’s?
Maybe I should refer to them as ‘Rivest S-expressions’ or ‘SPKI S-expressions’ instead.
> S-expressions don't have any way to encode type information in the data itself, you need a schema to know if a certain value should be treated as a number or a string.
Neither does JSON, as this whole thread indicates. This applies to other data types, too: while a Rivest expression could be
(date [iso8601]2025-05-24T12:37:21Z)
{
"date": "2025-05-24T12:37:21Z"
}
I really disagree. The whole reason YAML exists is to make JSON more readable. Within limits, the more data one can have in a screenful of text, the better. JSON is so terribly verbose if pretty-printed that it takes up screens and screens of text to represent a small amount of data — and when not pretty-printed, it is close to trying to read a memory trace.
Edit: updated link to the January 2025 proposal.
That Rivest draft defines canonical S-expressions to be the format in which every token is preceded by its length, so it's confusing to use "canonical" to describe the whole proposal, or use it as a synonym for the "advanced" S-expressions that the draft describes.
But that perhaps hints at some reasons that formats like JSON tend to win popularity contests over formats like Rivest's. JSON is a single format for authoring and reading, which doesn't address transport at all. The name is short, pronounceable (vs. "spikky" perhaps?), and clearly refers to one thing - there's no ambiguity about whether you might be talking about a transport encoding instead,
I'm not saying these are good reasons to adopt JSON over SPKI, just that there's a level of ambition in Rivest's proposal which is a poor match for how adoption tends to work in the real world.
There are several mechanism for JSON transport encoding - including plain old gzip, but also more specific formats like MessagePack. There isn't one single standard for it, but as it turns out that really isn't that important.
Arguably there's a kind of violation of separation of concerns happening in a proposal that tries to define all these things at once: "a canonical form ... two transport representations, and ... an advanced format".
JSON also had the major advantage of having an enormous ecosystem from day 1. It was ugly and kind of insecure, but the fact that every JavaScript implementation could already parse and emit JSON out of the box was a huge boost. It’s hard to beat that even if you have the best format in the world.
Haha yes, that does probably dwarf any other factors.
But still, I think if the original JSON spec had been longer and more comprehensive, along the lines of Rivest's, that could have limited JSON's popularity, or resulted in people just ignoring parts of it and focusing on the parts they found useful.
The original JSON RFC-4627 was about 1/3rd the size of the original Rivest draft (a body of 260 lines vs. 750); it defines a single representation instead of four; and e.g. the section on "Encoding" is just 3 sentences. Here it is, for reference: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt
We already see that a little bit. JSON in theory allows arbitrary decimal numbers, but in practice it’s almost always limited to numbers that are representable as an IEEE-754 double. It used to allow UTF-16 and UTF-32, but in practice only UTF-8 was widely accepted, and that eventually got reflected in the spec.
I’m sure you’re right. If even this simple spec exceeded what people would actually use as a real standard, surely anything beyond that would also be left by the wayside.
> clearly refers to one thing
Great, this looks like JSON. Is it JSON5? Does it expect bigint support? Can I use escape chars?
You're providing an example of my point. People don't, in general, care about any of that, so "solving" those "problems" isn't likely to help adoption.
To your specific points:
1. JSON5 didn't exist when JSON adoption occurred, and in any case they're pretty easy to tell apart, because JSON requires keys to be quoted. This is a non-problem. Why do you think it might matter? Not to mention that the existence of some other format that resembles JSON is hardly a reflection on JSON itself, except perhaps as a compliment to its perceived usefulness.
2. Bigint support is not a requirement that most people have. It makes no difference to adoption.
3. Escape character handling is pretty well defined in ECMA 404. Your point is so obscure I don't even know specifically what you might be referring to.
I agree with most of what you said, but json's numbers are problematic. For one thing, many languages have 64-bit integers, which can't be precisely represented as a double, so serializing such a value can lead to subtle bug if it is deserialized by a parser that only supports doubles. And deserializing in languages that have multiple numeric types is complicated, since the parser often doesn't have enough context to know what the best numeric type to use is.
The length thing sounds like an editor problem, but we have wasted too much time in coming up with syntax that pleases personal preferences without admitting we would be better off moving away from text.
927 can be avoided, but it's way harder than it seems, which is why we have the proliferation of standards that fail to become universal.
For you, perhaps. For me, the former is denser, but crossing into a "too dense" region. The JSON has indentation which is easy on my poor brain. Also, it's nice to differentiate between lists and objects.
But, I mean, they're basically isomorphic with like 2 things exchanges ({} and [] instead of (); implicit vs explicit keys/types).
Yeah. I don’t even blame S-expressions. I think I’ve just been exposed to so much json at this point that my visual system has its own crappy json parser for pretty-printed json.
S expressions may well be better. But I don’t think S expressions are better enough to be able to overcome json’s inertia.
even as a fan of s-expressions (see my other comment), i have to agree. but the problem here is the formatting. for starters, i would write the s-expression example as:
(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed
(detail "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected")
(subproblems ((urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed
(detail "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"")
(identifier (dns _example.org)))
(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier
(detail "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"")
(identifier (dns example.net))))))
but, i would also argue that the two examples are not equivalent. what is explicitly specified as "type" and "value" in the json data, is implied in the s-expression data. either format is fine, but it would be better to compare like for like:
an s-expression equivalent for the json example would look like this:
((type urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed)
(detail "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected)
(subproblems
((type urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed)
(detail "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"")
(identifier
(type dns)
(value _example.org)))
((type urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier)
(detail "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"")
(identifier
(type dns)
(value example.net)))))
{
"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed":
{
"detail": "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected",
"subproblems":
[
"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed":
{
"detail": "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"",
"identifier":
{
"dns": "_example.org"
}
},
"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier"
{
"detail": "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"",
"identifier":
{
"dns": "example.net"
}
}
]
}
}
{"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed": {
"detail": "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected",
"subproblems": [
"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed": {
"detail": "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"",
"identifier": {
"dns": "_example.org" }},
"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier": {
"detail": "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"",
"identifier": {
"dns": "example.net" }}]}}
because if we spread out the s-expression example:
(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed
(detail "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected")
(subproblems
((urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed
(detail "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"")
(identifier
(dns _example.org)
)
)
(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier
(detail "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"")
(identifier
(dns example.net)
)
)
)
)
)
> is far easier to read than this (the first JSON in RFC 8555):
It's not for me. I'd literally take anything over csexps. Like there is nothing that I'd prefer it to. If it's the only format around, then I'll just roll my own.
> Like there is nothing that I'd prefer it to.
May I suggest perl regex's? :)
> I contend that this is far easier to read than this
oh boi, that's some Lisp-like vs C-like level of holywar you just uncovered there
and wooow my opinion is opposite of yours
This doesn't help with numbers at all, though. Any textual representation of numbers is going to have the same problem as JSON.
> is far easier to read than this
Readability is a function of the reader, not the medium.
> Canonical S-expressions are not as easy to read and much harder to write by hand
You don't do that, any more than you read or write machine code in binary. You read and write regular S-expressions (or assembly code) and you translate that into and out of canonical S expressions (or machine code) with a tool (an assembler/disassembler).
I have written by hand and read JSON hundreds of times. You can tell me I shouldn’t, but I am telling you I do. Messing around with an API with curl, tweaking a request object slightly for testing something, etc.
Reading happens even more times. I am constantly printing out API responses when I am coding, verifying what I am seeing matches what I am expecting, or trying to get an idea of the structure of something. Sure, you can tell me I shouldn’t do this and I should just read a spec, but in my experience it is often much faster just to read the JSON directly. Sometimes the spec is outdated, just plain wrong, or doesn’t exist. Being able to read the JSON is a regular part of my day.
I think there may be a terminological disconnect here. S-expressions and canonical S-expressions are not the same thing. S-expressions (non-canonical) are a comparable to JSON, intended to be read and written by humans, and actually much easier to read and write than JSON because it uses less punctuation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression
A canonical S-expression is a binary format, intended to be both generated and parsed by machines, not humans:
you can use a program to convert between s-expressions and a more readable format. In a world where canonical s-expressions rule, this "more readable format" would probably be an ordinary s-expression
This seems like a just-so story. Your explanation could make some sense if we were comparing {"e" : "AQAB"} to {"e" : 65537}, but there is no reason why that should be the alternative. The JSON {"e" : "65537"} will be read precisely the same way by any JSON parser out there. Converting the string "65537" to the number 65537 is exactly as easy (or hard), but certainly unambiguous, as converting the string "AQAB" to the same number.
Of course, if you're doing this in JS and have reasons to think the resulting number may be larger than the precision of a double, you have a huge problem either way. Just as you would if you were writing this in C and thought the number may be larger than what can fit in a long long. But that's true regardless of how you represent it in JSON.
For very big numbers (that could appear in these fields), generating and parsing a base 10 decimal representation is way more cumbersome than using their binary representation.
The DER encoding used in the TLS certificates uses the big endian binary format. OpenSSL API wants the big endian binary too.
The format used by this protocol is a simple one.
It's almost exactly the format that is needed to use these numbers, except JSON can't store binary data directly. Converting binary to base 64 is a simple operation (just bit twiddling, no division), and it's easier than converting arbitrarily large numbers between base 2 and base 10. The 17-bit value happens to be an easy one, but other values may need thousands of bits.
It would be silly for the sender and recipient to need to use a BigNum library when the sender has the bytes and the recipient wants the bytes, and neither has use for a decimal number.
Some parsers, like PHP, may treat 65537 and "65537" the same. Room for vulnerability.
Why would they do so? It's semantically distinct JSON, even JS itself treats it differently?
It's PHP. Handling numbers in PHP is complicated enough that a reasonable person would not trust it by default.
https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.numeric-strings...
I know that PHP will treat a string as if it were a number if you try to use it in a context where number is expected; JS does the same thing. But why would that affect JSON deserialization in a way that makes numbers and strings indistinguishable in principle (causing the loss of precision as described here)?
Go can decode numbers losslessly as strings: https://pkg.go.dev/encoding/json#Number
json.Number is (almost) my “favorite” arbitrary decimal: https://github.com/ncruces/decimal?tab=readme-ov-file#decima...
I'm half joking, but I'm not sure why S-expressions would be better here. There are LISPs that don't do arbitrary precision math.
> Go can decode numbers losslessly as strings: https://pkg.go.dev/encoding/json#Number
Yup, and if you’re using JSON in Go you really do need to be using Number exclusively. Anything else will lead to pain.
> I'm half joking, but I'm not sure why S-expressions would be better here. There are LISPs that don't do arbitrary precision math.
Sure, but I’m referring specifically to https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-rivest-sexp-13.html, which only has lists and bytes, and so number are always just strings and it’s up to the program to interpret them.
For actual SERDES, JSON becomes very brittle. It's better to use something like protobuf or cap'n'proto for such cases.
What I don't understand is why you (and a lot of other people) just expect S-expression parsers to not have the exact same problems.
Because canonical S-expressions don’t have numbers, just atoms (i.e., byte sequences) and lists. It is up to the using code to interpret "34" as the string "34" or the number 34 or the number 13,108 or the number 13,363, which is part of the protocol being used. In most instances, the byte sequence is probably a decimal number.
Now, S-expressions as used for programming languages such as Lisp do have numbers, but again Lisp has bignums. As for parsers of Lisp S-expressions written in other languages: if they want to comply with the standard, they need to support bignums.
You can write JSON that exclusively uses strings, so this is not really relevant. Sure, maybe it can be considered an advantage that s-expressions force you to do that, though it can also be seen just as easily as a disadvantage. It certainly hurts readability of the format, which is not a 0-cost thing. This is also why all Lisps use more than plain sexps to represent their code: having different syntax for different types helps.
"it can do one of 4 things" sounds very much like the pre-existing issue with JSON
> Because canonical S-expressions don’t have numbers, just atoms (i.e., byte sequences) and lists.
If types other than string and a list bother you, why don't you stick with those types in JSON?
I think they mean that Common Lisp has bigints by default
As do Scheme and most other Lisps I'm familiar with, and integers/floats are typically specified to be distinct. I think we'd all be better off if that were true of JSON as well.
I'd be happy to use s-expressions instead :) Though to GP's point, I suppose we might then end up with JS s-expression parsers that still treat ints and floats interchangeably.
And in addition to that are unable to distingush between a string "42" and a number 42.
The funny thing about this is that JavaScript the language has had support for BigIntegers for many years at this point. You can just write 123n for a bigint of 123.
JSON could easily be extended to support them - but there’s no standards body with the authority to make a change like that. So we’re probably stuck with json as-is forever. I really hope something better comes along that we can all agree on before I die of old age.
While we’re at it, I’d also love a way to embed binary data in json. And a canonical way to represent dates. And comments. And I’d like a sane, consistent way to express sum types. And sets and maps (with non string keys) - which JavaScript also natively supports. Sigh.
It's more a problem of support and backwards compatibility. JSON and parsers for it are so ubiquitous, and the spec completely lacks any versioning support, that adding a feature would be a breaking change of horrible magnitude, on nearly all levels of the modern software infrastructure stack. I wouldn't be surprised if some CPUs might break from that :D
JSON is a victim of its success: it has become too big to fail, and too big to improve.
There are easy workarounds to getting bigints in JSON: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/jsbi/issues/30#issuecomm...
Sure; and I can encode maps and sets as entry lists. Binary data as strings and so on. But I don’t want to. I shouldn’t have to.
The fact remains that json doesn’t have native support for any of this stuff. I want something json-like which supports all this stuff natively. I don’t want to have to figure out if some binary data is base64 encoded or hex encoded or whatever, and hack around jackson or serde or javascript to encode and decode my objects properly. Features like this should be built in.
Agree. JSON definitely needs an update so we can get better ergonomics built in.
In code you control you can choose to use JSON5: https://json5.org/
Cool. Pity it still doesn’t support bigint, binary data, maps, sets, non-string keys or dates though.
But what's wrong with sending the number as a string? `"65537"` instead of `"AQAB"`
The question is how best to send the modulus, which is a much larger integer. For the reasons below, I'd argue that base64 is better. And if you're sending the modulus in base64, you may as well use the same approach for the exponent sent along with it.
For RSA-4096, the modulus is 4096 bits = 512 bytes in binary, which (for my test key) is 684 characters in base64 or 1233 characters in decimal. So the base64 version is much smaller.
Base64 is also more efficient to deal with. An RSA implementation will typically work with the numbers in binary form, so for the base64 encoding you just need to convert the bytes, which is a simple O(n) transformation. Converting the number between binary and decimal, on the other hand, is O(n^2) if done naively, or O(some complicated expression bigger than n log n) if done optimally.
Besides computational complexity, there's also implementation complexity. Base conversion is an algorithm that you normally don't have to implement as part of an RSA implementation. You might argue that it's not hard to find some library to do base conversion for you. Some programming languages even have built-in bigint types. But you typically want to avoid using general-purpose bigint implementations for cryptography. You want to stick to cryptographic libraries, which typically aim to make all operations constant-time to avoid timing side channels. Indeed, the apparent ease-of-use of decimal would arguably be a bad thing since it would encourage implementors to just use a standard bigint type to carry the values around.
You could argue that the same concern applies to base64, but it should be relatively safe to use a naive implementation of base64, since it's going to be a straightforward linear scan over the bytes with less room for timing side channels (though not none).
Converting large integers to decimal is nontrivial, especially when you don't trust languages to handle large numbers.
Why you wouldn't just use the hexadecimal that everyone else seems to use I don't know. There seems to be a rather arbitrary cutoff where people prefer base64 to hexadecimal.
This sounds like an XY problem to me. There is already an alternative that is at least as secure and only requires a single base-64 string: Ed25519.
PHP (at least old versions I worked with) treats "65537" and 65537 similarly.
That sounds horrible if you want to transmit a base64 string where the length is a multiple of 3 and for some cursed reason there's no letters or special characters involved. If "7777777777777777" is your encoded string because you're sending a string of periods encoded in BCD, you're going to have a fun time. Perhaps that's karma for doing something braindead in the first place though.
Too likely that this would not work because silent conversion to number along the way
Then just prefixing it with an underscore or any random letter would've been fine but of course base64 encoding the binary representation in base 64 makes you look so much smarter.
Is this ok ?
Python 3.13.3 (main, May 21 2025, 07:49:52) [GCC 14.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
information.
>>> import json
>>>
json.loads('47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000')
47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000I prefer
>> import json, decimal
>> j = "47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
>> json.loads(j, parse_float=decimal.Decimal, parse_int=decimal.Decimal)
Decimal('47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000')
>> import json
>> j = "0.47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
>> json.loads(j)
0.47234762761726473
>> import json, decimal
>> j = "0.47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
>> json.loads(j, parse_float=decimal.Decimal, parse_int=decimal.Decimal)
Decimal('0.47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000')Just cross your fingers and hope for the best if your data is at any point decoded by a json library that doesn’t support bigints? Python’s ability to handle them is beside the point of they get mangled into ieee754 doubles along the way.
yes, python falls into the sane language category with arbitrary-precision arithmetic
Not so much,
>>> s="1"+"0"*4300
>>> json.loads(s)
...
ValueError: Exceeds the limit (4300 digits) for integer string conversion:
value has 4301 digits; use sys.set_int_max_str_digits() to increase the limit
Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32753235
Your sibling comment suggests using decimal.Decimal which handles parsing >4300 digit numbers (by default).
This should be interpreted as a stop-gap measure before a subquadratic algorithm can be adopted. Take a look at _pylong.py in new enough CPython.
Seems like a large integer can always be communicated as a vector of byte values in some specific endian order, which is easier to deal with than Base64 since a JSON parser will at least convert the byte value from text to binary for you.
But yea, as a Clojure guy sexprs or EDN would be much better.
as someone who started the s-expression task on rosettacode.org, i approve. if you need an s-expression parser for your language, look here https://rosettacode.miraheze.org/wiki/S-expressions (the canonical url is https://rosettacode.org/wiki/S-expressions but they have DNS issues right now)
Wouldn't it just solve a whole lot of problems if we could just add optional type declarations to json? It seems so simple and obvious that I'm kinda dumbfounded that this is not a thing yet. Most of the time you would not need it, but it would prevent the parser from making a wrong guess in all those edge cases.
Probably there are types not every parser/language can accept, but at least it could throw a meaningful error instead of guessing or even truncating the value.
I doubt that would fix the issue. The real cause is that programmers mostly deal in fixed-size integers, and that’s how they think of integer values, since those are the concepts their languages provide. If you’re going to write a JSON library for your favourite programming language, you’re going to reach for whatever ints are the default, regardless of what the specs or type hints suggest.
Haskell’s Aeson library is one of the few exceptions I’ve seen, since it only parses numbers to ‘Scientific’s (essentially a kind of bigint for rationals.) This makes the API very safe, but also incredibly annoying to use if you want to just munge some integers, since you’re forced to handle the error case of the unbounded values not fitting in your fixed-size integer values.
Most programmers likely simply either don’t consider that case, or don’t want to have to deal with it, so bad JSON libraries are the default.
This is actually a deliberate design choice, which the breathtakingly short JSON standard explains quite well [0]. The designers deliberately didn't introduce any semantics and pushes all that to the implementors. I think this is a defensible design goal. If you introduce semantics, you're sure to annoy someone.
There's an element of "worse is better" here [1]. JSON overtook XML exactly because it's so simple and solves for the social element of communication between disparate projects with wildly different philosophies, like UNIX byte-oriented I/O streams, or like the C calling conventions.
---
[0] https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...
As you said - it’s not really a problem with the JSON structure and format itself, but the underlying parser, which is specifically designed to map to the initial js types. There are parsers that don’t have this problem, but then the JSON itself is not portable.
The problem with your solution is that it’s also not portable for the same reason (it’s not part of the standard), and the reason that it wasn’t done that way in the first place is because it wouldn’t map to those initial js types!
FYI, you can easily work around this by using replacer and revivers that are part of the standards for stringify and parse and treat numbers differently. But again, the json isn’t portable to places without those replacer/revivers.
I.e, the real problem is treating something that looks like json as json by using standards compliant json parsers - not the apparent structure of the format itself. You could fix this problem in an instant by calling it something other than JSON, but people will see it and still use a JSON parser because it looks like JSON, not because it is JSON.
Isn't the actual problem that it is supposed to map to JS types, which are badly designed, and thus being infectious for other ecosystems, that don't have these defects?
I'm still haunted by a bug caused by the JSON serializer our C# apps were using emitting bigints as JSON numbers, only for the JavaScript consumers to mangle them silently.
Kinda blows my mind that the accepted behavior is to just overflow and not raise an exception.
I try to stick to strings for anything that's not a 32 bit int now.
It feels like malpractice to use json in encryption
Sadly JWT and friends are "standard". In theory the representation and the data are independent and you can marshal and unmarshal correctly.
In practice, "alg:none" is a headache and everyone involved should be ashamed.
JSON is better than XML, but it really isn’t great.
Is the correct number implementation really the exception? The first 2 json decoders I just tried (Python & Clojure) worked correctly with that example.
Canonical S-expressions don't have an object/mapping type, which means you can't have generic tooling unambiguously perform certain common operations like data merges.
Aren't JSON parsers technically not following the standard if they don't reliably store a number that is not representable by a IEEE754 double precision float?
It's a shame JSON parsers usually default to performance rather than correctness, by using bignums for numbers.
Have a read through RFC7159 or 8259 and despair.
> This specification allows implementations to set limits on the range and precision of numbers accepted
JSON is a terrible interoperability standard.
So a JSON parser that cannot store a 2 is technically compliant? :(
JSON is a text format. A parser must recognize the text `2` as a valid production of the JSON number grammar.
Converting that text to _any_ kind of numerical value is outside the scope of the specification. (At least the JSON.org specification, the RFC tries to say more.)
As a textural format, when you use it for data interchange between different platforms, you should ensure that the endpoints agree on the _interpretation_, otherwise they won't see the same data.
Again outside of the scope of the JSON specification.
The more a format restricts, the more useful it is. E.g. if a format allows pretty much anything and it's up to parsers to accept or reject it, we may as well say "any text file" (or even "any data file") -- it would allow for anything.
Similarly to a "schema-less" DBMS -- you will still have a schema, it will just be in your application code, not enforced by the DBMS.
JSON is a nice balance between convenience and restrictions, but it's still a compromise.
A JSON parser has to check if a numeric value is actually numeric - the JSON {"a" : 123456789} is valid, but {"a" : 12345678f} is not. Per the RFC, a standards-compliant JSON parser can also refuse {"a": 123456789} if it considers the number is too large.
Yep. Or one that parses it into a 7 :)
I once debugged a production issue that boiled down to "A PCI compliance .dll was messing with floating point flags, causing the number 4 to unserialize as 12"
> Or one that parses it into a 7 :)
if it's known and acceptable that LLMs can hallucinate arguments to an API then i don't see how this isn't perfectly acceptable behavior either.
> Aren't JSON parsers technically not following the standard if they don't reliably store a number that is not representable by a IEEE754 double precision float?
That sentence has four negations and I honestly can't figure out what it means.
>> Aren't JSON parsers technically not following the standard if they don't reliably store a number that is not representable by a IEEE754 double precision float?
>That sentence has four negations and I honestly can't figure out what it means.
This example is halfway as bad as the one Orwell gives in my favorite essay, "Politics the the English Language"¹.
Compare and contrast:
>I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Orwell has much to say about either.
_____
¹https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
that Orwell quote can be saved a lot by proper punctuation
I am not, indeed, sure*,* whether it is not true to say that the Milton *(*who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley*)* had not become *-* out of an experience *-* ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect*,* which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Has the proper punctuation allowed you to see that there's an extra negation there that makes the sentence say the exact opposite of what the author intended it to say?
“The standard technically requires that JSON parsers reliably store numbers, even those that are not representable by an IEEE double”.
(It seems this claim is not true, but at least that’s what the sentence means.)
Aren't {X}? -> isn't it true that {X}?
{X} = JSON parsers technically [are] not following the standard if {reason}
{reason} = [JSON parsers] don't reliably store a number that {what kind of number?}
{what kind of number} = number that is not representable by a IEEE754 double precision float
seems simple
>JSON is better than XML
JSON is still hack garbage compared to XML from the turn of the millennia. Like most dominant tech standards, JSON took hold purely because many developers are intellectually lazy and it was easier to slam some sloppy JSON together than to understand XML.
XML with XSD, XPath and XQuery is simply a glorious combination.
I’m the technical lead for the Let’s Encrypt SRE/infra team. So I spend a lot of time thinking about this.
The salt here is deserved! JSON Web Signatures are a gnarly format, and the ACME API is pretty enthusiastic about being RESTful.
It’s not what I’d design. I think a lot of that came via the IETF wanting to use other IETF standards, and a dash of design-by-committee.
A few libraries (for JWS, JSON and HTTP) go a long way to making it more pleasant but those libraries themselves aren’t always that nice, especially in C.
I’m working on an interactive client and accompanying documentation to help here too, because the RFC language is a bit dense and often refers to other documents too.
> JSON Web Signatures are a gnarly format
They are??
As someone who wallows in ASN.1, Kerberos, and PKI, I don't find JWS so "gnarly". Even if you're open-coding a JSON Web Signature it will be easier than to open-code S/MIME, CMS, Kerberos, etc. Can you explain what is so gnarly about JWS?
Mind you, there are problems with JWT. Mainly that HTTP user-agents don't know how to fetch the darned things because there is not standard for how to find out how to fetch the darned things, when you should honor a request for them, etc.
I'd take ASN.1/DER over JWS any day :) It's the weekend and I don't feel I have the energy to launch a full roast of JWS, but to give some flavour, I'll link
https://auth0.com/blog/critical-vulnerabilities-in-json-web-...
Implementations can be written securely, but it's too easy to make mistakes.
Yeah, there's worse stuff from the 90s around, but JOSE and ACME is newer than that - we could have done better!
Alas, it's not changing now.
I think ASN.1 has some warts, but I think a lot of the problems with DER are actually in creaky old tools. People seem way happier with Protobuf, for example: I think that's largely down to tooling.
The whole not validating the signatures thing is a problem, yes. That can happen with PKI certificates too, but those have been around longer and -perhaps because one needed an ASN.1 stack- only people with more experience wrote PKI stacks than we see in the case of JWS?
I think Protocol Buffers is a disaster. Its syntax is worse than ASN.1 because you're required to write in tags, and it is a TLV encoding very similar to DER so... why _why_ does PB exist? Don't tell me it's because there were no ASN.1 tools around -- there were no PB tools around either!
Don't you think you are falling for classic whataboutism here?
Just because ASN.1 and friends are exceptionally bad, it does not mean that Json Web * cannot be bad also.
> Don't you think you are falling for classic whataboutism here?
I do not. This sort of codec complexity can't be avoided. And ASN.1 is NOT "exceptionally bad" -- I rather like ASN.1. The point was not "wait till you see ASN.1", but "wait till you see Kerberos" because Kerberos requires a very large amount of client-side smarts -- too much really because it's got more than 30 years of cruft.
What is she talking about that you have to pay for certs if you want more than 3? Am I about to get a bill for the past 5 years or did she just misunderstand?
to quote the article (or rather, the 2023 article which is the one mentioning the number 3).
"Somehow, a couple of weeks ago, I found this other site which claimed to be better than LE and which used relatively simple HTTP requests without a bunch of funny data types."
"This is when the fine print finally appeared. This service only lets you mint 90 day certificates on the free tier. Also, you can only do three of them. Then you're done. 270 days for one domain or 3 domains for 90 days, and then you're screwed. Isn't that great? "
She don't mention what this "other site" is.
FWIW, it is ZeroSSL. I want there to be more major ACME providers than just LE, but I'm not sure about ZeroSSL, personally. It seems to have the same parent company as IdenTrust (HID Global Corporation). Probably a step up from Honest Achmed but recently I recall people complaining that their EV code signing certificates were not actually trusted by Windows which is... Interesting.
IdenTrust participates in the US Federal PKI ecosystem, so they likely have strong incentives to charge exorbitantly. Those free certs are probably meant to facilitate development of gov-specific capabilities by random subcontractors long enough to figure out how to structure a contract mod that passes the anticipated cost onto the government.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
> Honest Achmed
I had to stop and Google that, wondering if it was a pastiche of “Akbar & Jeff’s Certificate Hut”...
Google's CA offers them for free via ACME https://pki.goog/
That's pretty cool, though it does seem that you need to authenticate with a GCP account. A little bit less convenient. I do think there are actually a few other providers of ACME out there that require registration beforehand, ZeroSSL actually offers it without pre-registration like Let's Encrypt.
Buypass provides ACME certificates as well [1]. The usage limits are not quite as generous as LE, but they work pretty well in my experience.
[1] https://www.buypass.com/products/tls-ssl-certificates/read-m...
A while ago I saw that acme.sh now uses ZeroSSL by default.
https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/blob/42bbd1b44af4...
"We now have another confirmation on Twitter that remote code is executed and a glimpse into what the script is... it appears to be benign."
https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/issues/4659
It was not. Don't use acme.sh.
I went down the acme/HiCA/RCE rabbit hole a year or so ago and, while I don't remember the specifics, my feeling was that the RCE was not that dangerous and was put into place by greedy scammers thwarting the rules of cert (re)selling and not by shadowy actors trying to infiltrate sensitive infra ...
Is there new information ? Was my impression wrong ?
ZeroSSL is owned by Identrust, but the infra is operated by another CA. Also Microsoft killed EV codesigning early last year - not stopping it working, just making it identical to ‘normal’ codesigning certs.
Could you please provide more info on this topic, e.g. a link? I intended to buy EV code signing certificate as a sole proprietor to fix long-standing problem with my software when Windows Defender pops up every time I release a new version. Is EV code signing certificate no longer a viable solution to this problem? Is there no longer a difference between EV and non-EV code signing certificate?
After Microsoft's March 2024 update, EV Code signing certs don't offer instant Microsoft Defender reputation. Now, OV and EV both code signing certificates can be installed and stored on FIPS 140 Level 2 or Common Criteria EAL 4+ certified HSM, tokens, or cloud HSMs. So, you can consider EV Code Signing as higher security and higher validation with no more difference. If u want to buy code signing at affordable cost, I recommend: https://signmycode.com/cheap-code-signing-certificates
Sure: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security/trusted-root/prog...
3.D.3 covers the details about EV CS.
> and the ACME API is pretty enthusiastic about being RESTful
Without looking at it, are you sure about that?
I once used to know what REST meant. Are you doing REST as in HATEOAS or as in "we expose some http endpoints"?
Everything is an object, identified by a URL. You start from a single URL (the directory), and you can find all the rest of the resources from URLs provided from there.
ACME models everything as JSON objects, each of which is identified by URL. You can GET them, and they link to other objects with Location and Link headers.
To quote from the blog post:
> Dig around in the headers of the response, looking for one named "Location". Don't follow it like a redirection. Why would you ever follow a Location header in a HTTP header, right? Nope, that's your user account's identifier! Yes, you are a URL now.
I don't know if it's the pure ideal of HATEOS, but it's about as close as I've seen in use.
It has the classic failing though: it’s used by scripts which know exactly what they want to do (get a cert), so the clients still hardcode the actions they need. It just adds a layer of indirection as they need to keep track of URLs.
I would have preferred if it was just an RPC-over-HTTP/JSON with fixed endpoints and numeric object IDs.
That's pretty good! Better than 99% claims of REST for sure! Thanks for the long reply.
REST has for a long long time meant "rpc via json over http". HATEOAS is a mythical beast nobody has ever seen in the wild.
Eh, I think that’s what it meant for a while. I’ve now interacted with enough systems that have rigor about representing things as resources that have GET urls and doing writes with POST etc that I don’t think it’s always the ad hoc RPC fest it once was. It may be rare to see according-to-hoyle HATEOAS but REST is definitely no longer in the “nobody actually does this” category.
I don't understand the tone of aggression against ACME and their plethora of clients.
I know it isn't a skill issue because of who the author is. So I can only imagine it is some sort of personal opinion that they dislike ACME as a concept or the tooling around ACME in general.
We've been using LE for a while (since 2019 I think) for handful of sites, and the best nonsense client _for us_ was https://github.com/do-know/Crypt-LE/releases.
Then this year we've done another piece of work this time against the Sectigo ACME server and le64 wasn't quite good enough.
So we ended up trying:-
- https://github.com/certbot/certbot on GitHub Actions, it was fine but didn't quite like the locked down environment
- https://github.com/go-acme/lego huge binary, cli was interestingly designed and the maintainer was quite rude when raising an issue
- https://github.com/rmbolger/Posh-ACME our favourite, but we ended up going with certbot on GHA once we fixed the weird issues around permissions
Edit* Re-read it. The tone isn't aimed at the ACME or the clients. It's the spec itself. ACME idea good, ACME implementation bad.
> I don't understand the tone of aggression against ACME and their plethora of clients.
> ACME idea good, ACME implementation bad.
Maybe I'm misreading but it sounds like you're on a similar page to the author.
As they said at the top of the article:
> Many of the existing clients are also scary code, and I was not about to run any of them on my machines. They haven't earned the right to run with privileges for my private keys and/or ability to frob the web server (as root!) with their careless ways.
This might seem harsh but when I think it's a pretty fair perspective to have when running security-sensitive processes.
No the author seems opposed to the idea specification of ACME, not just the implementation of the clients.
And a lot of the complaints ultimately boil down to not liking JWS. And I'm not really sure what she would have preferred there. ASN.1, which is even more complicated? Some bespoke format where implementations can't make use of existing libraries?
This is exactly the impression I got here.
I would have had sympathy for the disdain for certbot, but certbot wasn't called out and that isn't what the blog post is about at all.
I disagree, the author is overcomplicating and overthinking things.
She doesn't "trust" tooling that basically the entire Internet including major security-conscious organizations are using, essentially letting perfect get in the way of good.
I think if she were a less capable engineer she would just set that shit up using the easiest way possible and forget about it like everyone else, and nothing bad would happen. Download nginx proxy manager, click click click, boom I have a wilcard cert, who cares?
I mean, this is her https site, which seems to just be a blog? What type of risk is she mitigating here?
Essentially the author is so skilled that she's letting perfect get in the way of good.
I haven't thought about certificates for years because it's not worth my time. I don't really care about the tooling, it's not my problem, and it's never caused a security issue. Put your shit behind a load balancer and you don't even need to run any ACME software on your own server.
Sometimes I wonder how y’all became programmers. I learned basically everything by SRE-larping on my shitty nobody-cares-home-server for years and suddenly got paid to do it for real.
Who do you think they hire to manage those LBs for you? People who never ran any ACME software, or people who have a blog post turning over every byte of JSON in the protocol in excruciating detail?
Our backgrounds sound similar. I just don’t sweat all those details when I set things up.
I’m not advocating for the use of cloud services necessarily, not saying we all need to allow someone else to abstract away everything. And I realize that someone on an ops team has to actually set that up at a low level at some point.
What I am saying is that there’s a lot of open source software that has already invented the wheel for you. You can run it easily and be reasonably assured that it’s safe enough to be exposed to the internet.
I gave the example of nginx proxy manager. It may be basic software but for a personal blog it’ll get the job done and you can set it up almost entirely in a GUI following a simple YouTube tutorial. It’ll get you an wildcard certificate automatically, and it’ll be secure enough.
This is the same author that threw everyone into a panic about atop and turned out to not really have found anything.
Agreed and -- in particular -- I don't recall seeing any kind of "everybody get back into the pool" follow-up after the developers of atop quickly addressed the issue with an update. At least not any kind of follow-up that got the same kind of press as the initial alarm.
Im not a container guru by any means (at least not yet?) but would docker not suffice these concerns?
The issue is that the client needs to access the private key, tell web server where various temporary files are during the certificate generation (unless the client uses DNS mode) and tell the web server about a new certificate to reload.
To implement that many clients run as a root. Even if that root is in a docket container, this is needlessly elevated privileges especially given the complexity (again, needless) of many clients.
The sad part is that it is trivial to run most of the clients with an account with no privileges that can access very few files and use a unix socket to tell the web server to reload the certificate. But this is not done.
And then ideally at this point the web servers should if not implement then at least facilitate ACME protocol implementations, like, for example, redirect traffic requests from acme servers to another port with one-liner in config. But this is not the case.
Apache comes with built-in ACME support. Just enable the mod_md module: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_md.html
But the requirements you listed aren't actually requirements of ACME, they're lazy choices you could make but they aren't necessary. Some clients do better.
For example the client needs a Certificate Signing Request, one way to achieve that is to either have the client choose the private keys or give it access to a chosen key, but the whole point of a CSR is that you don't need the private key, the CSR can be made by another system, including manually by a human and it can even be re-used repeatedly so that you don't need new ones until you decide to replace your keys.
Yes, if we look back at my hopes when Let's Encrypt launched we can be very disappointed that although this effort was a huge success almost all the server vendors continued to ship garbage designed for a long past era where HTTPS is a niche technology they barely support.
I don't know that it's accurate, but at the beginning, it felt like using certbot was the only supported way to use ACME/LE, and it really wanted to do stuff as root and restart your webserver whenever.
Or you could run Caddy which had a built in ACME client, but then you're running an extra daemon.
apache_mod_md eventually came along which works for me, but it's also got some lazy things (it mostly just manages requesting certs, you've got to have a frequent enough reload to pick them up; I guess that's ok because I don't think public Apache ever learned to periodically check if it needs to reopen access logs when they're rotated, so you probably reload Apache from time to time anyway)
Before that was workable, I did need some certs and used acme.sh by hand, and it was nicer than trusting a big thing running in a cron and restarting things, but it was also inconvenient becsause I had to remember to go do it.
> I don't know that it's accurate, but at the beginning, it felt like using certbot was the only supported way to use ACME/LE, and it really wanted to do stuff as root and restart your webserver whenever.
It's fair to say that on day one the only launch client was Certbot, although on that day it wasn't called "Certbot" yet so if that's the name you remember it wasn't the only one. Given that it's not guaranteed this will be a success (like the American Revolution, or the Harry Potter books it seems obvious in hindsight but that's too late) it's understandable that they didn't spend lots of money developing a variety of clients and libraries you might want.
Yes, it does.
I run acme in a non privileged jail whose file system I can access from outside the jail.
So acme sees and accesses nothing and I can pluck results out with Unix primitives from the outside.
Yes, I use dns mode. Yes, my dns server is also a (different) jail.
My reading of the article suggested to me that the author took exception to the code that touched the keying material. Docker is immaterial to that problem. I won’t deign to speak for Rachel By The Bay (mother didn’t raise a fool, after all), but I expect Docker would be met with a similar regard.
Which I do understand. Although I use Docker, I mainly use it personally for things I don’t want to spend much time on. I don’t really like it over other alternatives, but it makes standing up a lab service stupidly easy.
I use docker for the same reasons as the author's reservations - I combine a docker exec with some of my own loose automation around moving & chmod-ing files & directories to obviate the need for the acme client to have unfettered root access to my system.
Whether it's a local binary or a dockerised one, that access still needs to be marshalled either way & it can get complex facilitating that with a docker container. I haven't found it too bad but I'd really rather not need docker for on-demand automations.
I give plenty* of services root access to my system, most of which I haven't written myself & I certainly haven't audited their code line-by-line, but I agree with the author that you do get a sense from experience of the overall hygiene of a project & an ACME client has yet to give me good vibes.
* within reason
Copilot suggests:
docker run --rm \
-v /srv/mywebsite/certs:/acme.sh/certs \
-v /srv/mywebsite/public/.well-known/acme-
challenge:/acme-challenge \
neilpang/acme.sh --issue \
--webroot /acme-challenge \
-d yourdomain.com \
--cert-file /acme.sh/certs/cert.pem \
--key-file /acme.sh/certs/key.pem \
--fullchain-file /acme.sh/certs/fullchain.pem
Yeah I'm not running anything llms spit at me in a security-sensitive context.
That example is not so bad - you've already pointed out the main obvious supply-chain attack vector in referencing a random ephemeral fork, but otherwise it's certonly (presumably neil's default) so it's the simplest case. Many clients have more... intrusive defaults that prioritise first-run cert onboarding which is opening more surface area for write error.
> I don't understand the tone of aggression against ACME and their plethora of clients.
The older posts on the same website provided a bit more context for me to understand today's post better:
- "Why I still have an old-school cert on my https site" - January 3, 2023 - https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/01/03/ssl/
- "Another look at the steps for issuing a cert" - January 4, 2023 - https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/01/04/cert/
Some people don't want to be forced to run a bunch of stuff they don't understand on the server, and I agree with them.
Sadly, security is a cat and mouse game, which means it's always evolving and you're forced to keep up - and it's inherent by the nature of the field, so we can't really blame anyone (unlike, say, being forced to integrate with the latest Google services to be allowed on the Play Store). At least you get to write your own ACME client if you want to. You don't have to use certbot, and there's no TPM-like behaviour locking you out of your own stuff.
> Some people don't want to be forced to run a bunch of stuff they don't understand on the server
It's not just about not understanding, it's that more complex stuff is inherently more prone to security vulnerabilities, however well you think you reviewed its code.
> It's that more complex stuff is inherently more prone to security vulnerabilities
That's overly simplifying it and ignores the part where the simple stuff is not secure to begin with.
In the current context you could take a HTTP client with a formally verified TLS stack, would you really say it's inherently more vulnerable than a barebones HTTP client talking to a server over an unencrypted connection? I'd say there's a lot more exposed in that barebones client.
The alternative of the article was ACME vs other ways of getting TLS certificates, not https vs http.
Of course plain http would be, generally, much more dangerous than a however complex encrypted connection
Non-ACME certs are basically over. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. I understand people being squeamish about it; we fear change. But I think it's a hopeful thing: the Web PKI is evolving. This is what that looks like: you can't evolve and retain everyone's prior workflows, and that has been a pathology across basically all Internet security standards work for decades.
ACME is cool (compared to what came before it), but I'm kind of sad that EV certs never seemed to pan out at all. I feel like they're a neat concept, and had the potential to mitigate a lot of scams or phishing websites in an ideal world. (That said, discriminating between "big companies" and "everyone else who can't afford it" would definitely have some obvious downsides.) Does anyone know why they never took off?
> Does anyone know why they never took off?
Browser vendors at some point claimed it confused users and removed the highlight (I think the same browser vendors who try to remove the "confusing" URL bar ...)
Aside from that EV certificates are slow to issue and phishers got similar enough EV certs making the whole thing moot.
Because they actively thwarted security.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/12/nope-...
https://web.archive.org/web/20191220215533/https://stripe.ia...
> this site uses an EV certificate for "Stripe, Inc", that was legitimately issued by Comodo. However, when you hear "Stripe, Inc", you are probably thinking of the payment processor incorporated in Delaware. Here, though, you are talking to the "Stripe, Inc" incorporated in Kentucky.
There's a lot of validation that's difficult to get around in DV (Domain Validation) and in DNS generally. Unless you go to every legal jurisdiction in the world and open businesses and file and have granted trademarks, you _cannot_ guarantee that no other person will have the same visible EV identity as you.
It's up to visitors to know that apple.com is where you buy Apple stuff, while apple.net, applecart.com, 4ppl3.com, аррlе.сом, ., example.com/https://apple.com are not. But if they can manage that, they can trust apple.com more than they could any URL with an "Apple, Inc." EV certificate. When browsers show the URL bar tend to highlight the top-level domain prominently, and they reject DNS names with mixed script, to avoid scammers fooling you. It's working better than EV.
EV can't actually work. It was always about branding for the for-profit CAs so that they have a premium product which helps the line go up. Let me give you a brief history - you did ask.
In about 2005, the browser vendors and the Certificate Authorities began meeting to see if they could reach some agreement as neither had what they wanted and both might benefit from changes. This is the creation of the CA/Browser Forum aka CA/B Forum which still exists today.
From the dawn of SSL the CAs had been on a race to the bottom on quality and price.
Initially maybe somebody from a huge global audit firm that owns a CA turn up on a plane and talks to your VP of New Technology about this exciting new "World Wide Web" product, maybe somebody signs a $1M deal over ten years, and they issue a certificate for "Huge Corporation, Inc" with all the HQ address details, etc. and oh yeah, "www.hugecorp.example" should be on there because of that whole web thing, whatever that's about. Nerd stuff!
By 2005 your web designer clicks a web page owned by some bozo in a country you've never heard of, types in the company credit card details, company gets charged $15 because it's "on sale" for a 3 year cert for www.mycompany.example and mail.mycompany.com is thrown in for free, so that's nice. Is it secure? Maybe? I dunno, I think it checked my email address? Whatever. The "real world address" field in this certificate now says "Not verified / Not verified / None" which is weird, but maybe that's normal?
The CAs can see that if this keeps up in another decade they'll be charging $1 each for 10 year certificates, they need a better product and the browser vendors can make that happen.
On the other hand the browser vendors have noticed that whereas auditors arriving by aeroplane was a bit much, "Our software checked their email address matched in the From line" is kinda crap as an "assurance" of "identity".
So, the CA/B Baseline Requirements aka BRs are one result. Every CA agreed they'd do at least what the "baseline" required and in practice that's basically all they do because it'd cost extra to do more so why bother. The BRs started out pretty modest - but it's amazing what you find people were doing when you begin writing down the basics of what obviously they shouldn't do.
For example, how about "No issuing certificates for names which don't exist" ? Sounds easy enough right? When "something.example" first comes into existence there shouldn't already be certificates for "something.example" because it didn't exist... right? Oops, lots of CAs had been issuing those certificates, reasoning that it's probably fine and hey, free money.
Gradually the BRs got stricter, improving the quality of this baseline product in both terms of the technology and the business processes, this has been an enormous boon, because it's an agreement for the industry this ratchets things for everybody, so there's no race to the bottom on quality because your competitors aren't allowed to do worse than the baseline. On price, the same can't be said, zero cost certificates are what Let's Encrypt is most famous for after all.
The other side of the deal is what the CAs wanted, they wanted UI for their new premium product. That's EV. Unlike many of the baseline requirements, this is very product focused (although to avoid being an illegal cartel it is forbidden for CA/B Forum to discuss products, pricing etc.) and so it doesn't make much technical sense.
The EV documents basically say you get all of the Baseline, plus we're going to check the name of your business - here's how we'll check - and then the web browser is going to display that name. It's implied that these extra checks cost more money (they do, and so this product is much more expensive). So improvements to that baseline do help still, but they also help everybody who didn't buy the premium EV product.
Now, why doesn't this work in practice? The DNS name or IP address in an "ordinary" certificate can be compared to reality automatically by the web browser. This site says it is news.ycombinator.com, it has a certificate for news.ycombinator.com, that's the same OK. Your browser performs this check, automatically and seamlessly, for every single HTTP transaction. Here on HN that's per page load, but on many sites you're doing transactions as you click UI or scroll the page, each is checked.
With EV the checks must be done by a human, is this site really "Bob's Burgers" ? Actually wait, is it really "Bob's Burgers of Ohio, US" ? Worse, probably although you know them as Bob's Burgers, legally, as you'd see on their papers of incorporation they are "Smith Restaurant Holdings Inc." and they're registered in Delaware because of course they are.
So now you're staring at the formal company name of a busines and trying to guess whether that's legitimate or a scam. But remember you can't just do this check once, scammers might find a way to redirect some traffic and so you need to check every individual transaction like your web browser does. Of course it's a tireless machine and you are not.
So in practice this isn't effective.
Still sounds better than nothing. And gives companies an incentive to register under their actual names.
I'm not convinced on either, the mindless automation is always effective so you just don't need to think about it, whereas for EV you need to intimately understand exactly which transactions you verified and what that means - the login HTML was authentic but you didn't check the Javascript? The entire login page was checked but HTTP POST of your password was not? The redirect to payment.mybank.example wasn't checked? Only the images were checked?
Imagine explaining to my mother how to properly check this, then imagine explaining why the check she just made is wrong now because the bank changed how their login procedure works.
We could have attempted something with better security, although nowhere close to fool proof, but the CAs were focused on a profitable product not on improving security, and I do not expect anyone to have another bite of that cherry.
As to the incentive to register, this is a cart v horse problem. Most businesses do not begin with a single unwavering vision of their eventual product and branding, they iterate, and that means the famous branding will need an expensive corporate change just to make the EV line up properly, that's just not going to happen much of the time, so people get used to seeing the "wrong" name and once that happens this is worthless.
Meanwhile crooks can spend a few bucks to register a similar-sounding name and registration authorities don't care, while the machine sees at a glance the differences between bobs-burgers.example and robs-burgers.example and bobsburgers.example, the analogous business registrations look similar enough that humans would click right past.
Why would you have to verify every transaction? If the page is from Big Bank Corp Of America, they're responsible for the whole page. Including any Javascript viruses they ill-advisedly include on their page.
Phishers also got EV certs.
The big problem with PKI is that there are known bad (or at least sketchy) actors on the big CA lists that realistically can't be taken off that list.
How big of a problem is it really, with CAA records and FIDO2 or passkeys?
CAA makes sure only one CA signs the cert for the real domain. FIDO2 prevents phising on a similar-looking domain. EV would force a phisher to get a similar-looking corporate name, but it's beside the main FIDO2 protection.
What's an example?
We're in an era where browsers have forced certificate transparency and removed major vendor CAs when they've issued certificates in violation of the browsers' requirements.
The concern about bad/sketchy CAs in the list feels dated.
> Some people don't want to be forced to run a bunch of stuff they don't understand on the server, and I agree with them.
There are a number of shell-based ACME clients whose prerequisites are: OpenSSL and cURL. You're probably already relying on OpenSSL and cURL for a bunch of things already.
If you can read shell code you can step through the logic and understand what they're doing. Some of them (e.g., acme.sh) often run as a service user (e.g., default install from FreeBSD ports) so the code runs unprivileged: just add a sudo (or doas) config to allow it to restart Apache/nginx.
Given that keys probably need to be shared between multiple gateway/ingresses, how common is it to just use some HSM or another mechanism of exchanging the keys with all the instances? The acme client doesn’t have to run on the servers itself.
> The acme client doesn’t have to run on the servers itself.
This is really important to understand if you care about either: Actually engineering security at some scale or knowing what's actually going on in order to model it properly in your head.
If you just want to make a web site so you can put up a blog about your new kitten, any of the tools is fine, you don't care, click click click, done.
For somebody like Rachel or many HN readers, knowing enough of the technology to understand that the ACME client needn't run on your web servers is crucial. It also means you know that when some particular client you're evaluating needs to run on the web server that it's a limitation of that client not of the protocol - birds can't all fly, but flying is totally one of the options for birds, we should try an eagle not an emu if we want flying.
> Some people don't want to be forced to run a bunch of stuff they > don't understand on the server, and I agree with them.
Honest question:
* Do you understand OS syscalls in detail?
* Do you understand how your BIOS initializes your hardware?
* Do you understand how modern filesystems work?
* Do you understand the finer details of HTTP or TCP?
Because... I don't. But I know enough about them that I'm quite convinced each of them is a lot more difficult to understand than ACME. And all of them and a lot more stuff are required if you want to run a web server.
This point is so tired. I don’t understand how a thought forms in my neurons, eventually matures into a decision and how the wires in my head translate this into electrical pulses to my finger muscles to type this post so I guess I can’t have opinions about complexity.
I get where you’re going with this, but in this particular case it might not be relevant because there’s a decent chance that Rachel By The Bay does actually understand all those things.
Sure - but people are still free to decide where they draw the line.
Each extra bit of software is an additional attack surface after all
An OS is (at least generally) a prerequisite. If minimalism is your goal then you'd want to eliminate tangentially related things that aren't part of the underlying requirements.
If you're a fan of left-pad I won't judge but don't expect me to partake without bitter complaints.
I hear some variation of this line of 'reasoning' about once a week, and it's always followed by some variation of "...and that's why we shouldn't have to do all this security stuff you want us to do".
If you want to actually implement an ACME client from first principles, reading the RFC (plus related RFCs for JOSE etc) is probably easier than you think. I did exactly that when I made a client for myself.
I also wrote up a digested description of the issuance flow here: https://www.arnavion.dev/blog/2019-06-01-how-does-acme-v2-wo... It's not a replacement for reading the RFCs, but it presents the information in the sequence that you would follow for issuance, so think of it like an index to the RFC sections.
Implementing an ACME client is part of the final lab assignment for MIT’s security class: https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2023/labs/lab5.html
Nice thanks! I’ve been wanted to learn it as dealing with cert expirations every year is a pain. My guess is that we will have 24 hour certs at some point.
Looks like a good class; is it only available to enrolled students? videos seem to be behind a log-in wall.
Looks like the 2023 lectures weren't uploaded to YouTube, but the lectures from earlier iterations of the class, including 2022, are available publicly. For example, see the YouTube links on https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2022/
(6.858 is the old name of the class, it was renamed to 6.5660 recently.)
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Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
I appreciate the author calling this stuff out. The increasing complexity of the protocols that the web is built on is not a problem for developers who simply need to find a tool or client to use the protocol, but it is a kind of regulatory capture that ensures only established players will be the ones able to meet the spec required to run the internet.
I know ACME alone is not insurmountably complex, but it is another brick in the wall.
These protocols all have open source implementations. And as AI gets stronger this barrier will get smaller and smaller.
So instead of designing simpler protocols (like HTTP/1.1 is), we do not care and let AI figure it out? Sounds great to me... /s
OpenBSD has a dead-simple lightweight ACME client (written in C) as part of the base OS. No need to roll your own. I understand it was created because existing alternatives ARE bloatware and against their Unixy philosophy.
Perhaps the author wasn't looking hard enough. It could probably be ported with little effort.
When I last checked this client is a classic example of OpenBSD philosophy not understanding why security is the way it is.
This client really wants the easy case where the client lives on the machine which owns the name and is running the web server, and then it uses OpenBSD-specific partitioning so that elements of the client can't easily taint one another if they're defective
But, the ACME protocol would allow actual air gapping - the protocol doesn't care whether the machine which needs a certificate, the machine running an ACME client, and the machine controlling the name are three separate machines, that's fine, which means if we do not use this OpenBSD all-in-one client we can have a web server which literally doesn't do ACME at all, an ACME client machine which has no permission to serve web pages or anything like that, and name servers which also know nothing about ACME and yet the whole system works.
That's more effort than "I just install OpenBSD" but it's how this was designed to deliver security rather than putting all our trust in OpenBSD to be bug-free.
I said it was dead-simple and you delivered a treatise describing the most complex use case possible. Then maybe it's not for you.
Most software in the OpenBSD base system lacks features on purpose. Their dev team frequently rejects patches and feature requests without compelling reasons to exist. Less features means less places for things to go wrong means less chance of security bugs.
It exists so their simple webserver (also in the base system) has ACME support working out of the box. No third party software to install, no bullshit to configure, everything just works as part of a super compact OS. Which to this day still fits on a single CD-ROM.
Most of all no stupid Rust compiler needed so it works on i386 (Rust cannot self-host on i386 because it's so bloated it runs out of memory, which is why Rust tools are not included in i386).
If your needs exceed this or you adore complexity then feel free to look elsewhere.
Or uacme [0] - litle bit of C that's been running perfectly since endless battery failures with the LE python client made us look for something that would last longer.
Came here to mention this.
Man page: https://man.openbsd.org/man1/acme-client.1
Source: https://github.com/openbsd/src/tree/master/usr.sbin/acme-cli...
There's something to be said for implementing stuff like this manually for the experience of having done it yourself, but the author's tone makes it sound like she hates the protocol and all the extra work she needs to do to make the Let's Encrypt setup work.
Kind of makes me wonder what kind of stack her website is running on that something like a lightweight ACME library (https://github.com/jmccl/acme-lw comes to mind, but there's a C++ library for ESP32s that should be even more lightweight) loading in the certificates isn't doing the job.
> but the author's tone makes it sound like she hates the protocol and all the extra work she needs to do to make the Let's Encrypt setup work.
The problem is, SSL is a fucking hot, ossified mess. Many of the noted core issues, especially the weirdnesses around encoding and bitfields, are due to historical baggage of ASN.1/X.509. It's not fun to deal with it, at all... the math alone is bad enough, but the old abstractions to store all the various things for the math are simply constrained by the technological capabilities of the late '80s.
There would have been a chance to at least partially reduce the mess with the introduction of LetsEncrypt - basically, have the protocol transmit all of the required math values in a decent form and get an x.509 cert back - and HTTP/2, but that wasn't done because it would have required redeveloping a bunch of stuff from scratch whereas one can build an ACME CA with, essentially, a few lines of shell script, OpenSSL and six crates of high proof alcohol to drink away one's frustrations of dealing with OpenSSL, and integrate this with all software and libraries that exist there.
There's no easy way to "just" transmit data in a foolproof manner. You practically need to support CSRs as a CA anyway, so you might as well use the existing ASN.1+X509 system to transmit data.
ASN.1 and X509 aren't all that bad. It's a comprehensively documented binary format that's efficient and used everywhere, even if it's hidden away in binary protocols you don't look at every day.
Unlike what most people seem to think, ACME isn't something invented just for Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt was certainly the first high-profile CA to implement the protocol, but various CAs (free and paid) have their own ACME servers and have had them for ages now. It's a generic protocol for certificate authorities to securely do domain validation and certificate provisioning that Let's Encrypt implemented first.
The unnecessarily complex parts of the protocol when writing a from-the-ground-up client are complex because ACME didn't reinvent the wheel, and reused existing standard protocols instead. Unfortunately, that means having to deal with JWS, but on the other hand, it means most people don't need to write their own ACME-JWS-replacement-protocol parsers. All the other parts are complex because the problem ACME is solving is actually quite complex.
The author wrote [another post](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/01/03/ssl/) about the time they fell for the lies of a CA that promised an "easier" solution. That solution is pretty much ACME, but with more manual steps (like registering an account, entering domain names).
I personally think that for this (and for many other protocols, to be honest) XML would've been a better fit as its parsers are more resilient against weird data, but these days talking about XML will make people look at you like you're proposing COBOL. Hell, I even exchanging raw, binary ASN.1 messages would probably have gone over pretty well, as you need ASN.1 to generate the CSR and request the certificate anyway. But, people chose "modern" JSON instead, so now we're base64 encoding values that JSON parsers will inevitably fuck up instead.
> Unlike what most people seem to think, ACME isn't something invented just for Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt was certainly the first high-profile CA to implement the protocol, but various CAs (free and paid) have their own ACME servers and have had them for ages now. It's a generic protocol for certificate authorities to securely do domain validation and certificate provisioning that Let's Encrypt implemented first.
This depends on whether you're speaking as a matter of history. ACME was originally invented and implemented by the Let's Encrypt team, but in the hope that it could become an open standard that would be used by other CAs. That hope was eventually borne out.
The described protocol looks like rewording of X509 with json syntax, but you still have X509, as a result you have two X509. Replay nonce is used straightforwardly as serial number, termsOfServiceAgreed can be extension, and CSR is automatically signed in the process of generation.
Yes, we actually considered the "have the protocol transmit all of the required math values in a decent form and get an x.509 cert back" version, but some people who were interested in using Let's Encrypt were apparently very keen on being able to use an existing external CSR. So that became mandatory in order not to have two totally separate code paths for X.509-based requests and non-X.509-based requests.
An argument for this is that it makes it theoretically possible for devices that have no knowledge of anything about PKI since the year 2000, and/or no additional programmability, to use Let's Encrypt certs (obtained on their behalf by an external client application). I have, in fact, subsequently gotten something like that to work as a consultant.
Yikes. Guessed as much. Thanks for your explanation.
As for oooold devices - doesn't LetsEncrypt demand key lengths and hash algorithms nowadays that simply weren't implemented back then?
Yes, I guess 2000 would actually be an exaggeration these days, as you can't use SHA-1 or 1024-bit RSA subject keys. So you could maintain compatibility with oold devices, but not with oooold devices.
> Make an RSA key of 4096 bits. Call it your personal key.
This is bad advice - making a 4096 bit key slows down visitors of your website and only gives you 2048 bits of security (if someone can break a 2048 bit RSA key they'll break the LetsEncrypt intermediate cert and can MITM your site). You should use a 2048 bit leaf certificate here
My webhost only supports RSA keys, so I use an RSA-4096 key just to annoy them into supporting EC keys.
Amateur question: does a 4096 not give you more security against passive capture and future decrypting? Or is the intermediate also a factor in such an async attack?
> does a 4096 not give you more security against passive capture and future decrypting?
If the server was using a key exchange that did not support forward secrecy then yes. But:
% echo | openssl s_client -connect rachelbythebay.com:443 2>/dev/null | grep Cipher
New, TLSv1.2, Cipher is ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
Cipher : ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
I thought FS only protected other sessions from leak of your current session key. How does it protect against passive recording of the session and later attacking of the recorded session in the future?
If using a non-FS key exchange (like RSA) then the value that the session key is derived from (the pre-master secret) is sent over the wire encrypted using the server's public key. If that session is recorded and in the future the server's private key is obtained, it can be used to decrypt the pre-master secret, derive the session key, and decrypt the entire session.
If on the other hand you use a FS key exchange (like ECDHE), and the session is recorded, and the server's private key is obtained, the session key cannot be recovered (that's a property of ECDHE or any forward-secure key exchange), and none of the traffic is decryptable.
> the session key cannot be recovered
Of course it can, but only for that specific session.
No, my GP is correct: if the server's RSA private key is compromised it does not allow decryption of any previously-recorded sessions.
You would need to compromise the _ephemeral session key_ which is difficult because it is discarded by both parties when the session is closed.
Compromising the RSA key backing the certificate allows _future_ impersonations of the server, which is a different attack altogether.
The certificate is for authentication of the server. It has nothing to do with the encryption of the data.
Basically forward secrecy is where both the sender and receiver throw away the key after the data is decrypted. That way the key is not available for an attacker to get access to later. If the attacker can find some way other than access to the key to decrypt the data then forward secrecy has no benefit.
I was amazed by them having so much distrust of the various clients. Certbot is typically in the repositories for things like Debian/Ubuntu.
My favourite client is probably https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh
If you use a DNS service provider that supports it, you can use the DNS-01 challenge to get a certificate - that means that you can have the acme.sh running on a completely different server which should help if you're twitchy about running a complex script on it. It's also got the advantage of allowing you to get certificates for internal/non-routable addresses.
Certbot is definitely one of the strongest arguments against ACME and Let's Encrypt.
Personally, I find that tls-alpn-01 is even nicer than dns-01. You can run a web server (or reverse proxy) that listens to port 443, and nothing else, and have it automatically obtain and renew TLS certificates, with the challenges being sent via TLS ALPN over the same port you're already listening on. Several web servers and reverse proxies have support for it built in, so you just configure your domain name and the email address you want to use for your Let's Encrypt account, and you get working TLS.
Does this only work if LE can reach port 443 on one of your servers/proxies?
Yes. If you want to create certificates for a private server you have to use a different mechanism, such as dns-01.
Certbot goes out of its way to be inscrutable about what it’s doing. It munges your web server config (temporarily) to handle http challenges, and for true sysadmins who are used to having to know all the details of what’s going on, that sort of script is a nightmare waiting to happen.
I assume certbot is the client she’s alluding to that misinterprets one of the factors in the protocol as hex vs decimal and somehow things still work, which is incredibly worrisome.
Having my ACME client munge my webserver configs to obtain a cert was one of the supreme annoyances about using them — it felt severely constraining on how I structured my configs, and even though it’s a blip, I hated the double restart required to fetch a cert (restart with new config, restart with new cert).
Then I discovered the web-root approach people mention here and it made a huge difference. Now I have the HTTP snippet in my server set to serve up ACME challenges from a static directory and push everything else to HTTPS, and the ACME client just needs write permission to that directory. I can dynamically include that snippet in all of the sites my server handles and be done.
If I really felt like it, I could even write a wrapper function so the ACME client doesn’t even need restart permissions on the web-server (for me, probably too much to bother with, but for someone like Rachel perhaps worthwhile).
A wrapper function may be overkill when you can do something like this:
letsencrypt renew --non-interactive --post-hook "systemctl reload nginx"Oh definitely, but her point was she didn’t want the ACME client having the rights to frob the webserver — I figured that meant restart-rights too. :)
With the HTTP implementation that's true, but the DNS implementation of certbot's certificate request plugins don't touch your server config. As an added bonus, you can use that to also obtain wildcard certificates for your subdomains so different applications can share the same certificate (so you only need one single ACME client).
You can configure certbot to write in a directory directly and it won't touch your web server config.
> It munges your web server config (temporarily) to handle http challenges
I run it in "webroot" mode on NgINX servers so it's just a matter of including the relevant config file in your HTTP sections (likely before redirecting to HTTPS) so that "/.well-known/acme-challenge/" works correctly. Then when you do run certbot, it can put the challenge file into the webroot and NgINX will automatically serve it. This allows certbot to do its thing without needing to do anything with NgINX.
I used to like them, then they somehow sold out to zerossl and switched the default there from LE after an update.
Pinned to an old version and looking for a replacement right now.
That annoyed me as well given the wording on the ZeroSSL site suggested one has to create an account which is not true. I had hit an error using DNS-01 at the time. They have an entirely different page for ACME clients but it is not or was not linked from anywhere on the main page.
If anyone else ran into that it's just a matter of adding
--server letsencryptYou can also permanently change your default to LE — acme.sh actually has instructions for doing so in their wiki.
I rather liked using ZeroSSL for a long time (perhaps just out of knee-jerk resistance to the “Just drink the Koolaid^W^W^Wuse Let’s Encrypt! C’mon man, everyone’s doing it!” nature of LE usage), but of late ZeroSSL has gotten so unreliable that I’ve rolled my eyes and started swapping things back to LE.
I only started using it after the default was ZeroSSL, but it's easy to specify LetsEncrypt instead
I feel like acme.sh is the kind of client she's ranting about. 8000 lines of shell code in acme.sh and more in dozens of user-contributed hook scripts, and over 1000 open issues on github?
Personally I like https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated. Same concept as acme.sh but only 2500 lines of shell and 54 open issues. You do have to roll your own hook script though.
Curiously, first commits for both acme.sh and dehydrated were in December 2015. Maybe they both took a security class at uni that fall.
Agree with the acme.sh recommendation. It's my favourite by far (especially, as you point out, when leveraging with DNS-01 challenges so you can sidestep most of the security risks the article author worries about)
Dunno about the protocol, but man, working with certbot and getting it do what I wanted was ... well, a lot more work than I would have guessed. The hooks system was so much trouble that I ended up writing my own.
But yeah, can definitely recommend DNS-01 over HTTP-01, since it doesn't involve implicitly messing with your server settings, and makes it much easier to have a single locked server with all the ACME secrets, and then distribute the certs to the open-to-the-internet web servers.
certbot is complexity creep at it's finest. I'd love to hear Rachel's take on it.
+1 for acme.sh, it's beautiful.
acme.sh is 8000 lines, still a magnitude better than certbot for something security-critical, but not great.
tiny-acme.py is 200 lines, easy to audit and incorporate parts into your own infrastructure. It works well for the tiny work it does but it does support anything more modern.
I am running an HTTP-only blog and it's getting harder every year not to switch to HTTPS.
For instance, Whatsapp can not open HTTP links anymore.
You're making a mistake assuming that the push for HTTPS-only Web is about protecting the content of your site.
The problem is that mere existence of HTTP is a vulnerability. Users following any insecure link to anywhere allow MITM attackers to inject any content, and redirect to any URL.
These can be targeted attacks against vulnerabilities in the browser. These can be turning browsers into a botnet like the Great Cannon. These can be redirects, popunders, or other sneaky tab manipulation for opening phishing pages for other domains (unrelated to yours) that do have important content.
Your server probably won't even be contacted during such attack. Insecure URLs to your site are the vulnerability. Don't spread URLs that disable network-level security.
You can proxy it, which for a small server might be the best way to avoid heavy traffic, through caching at the proxy.
For god's sake, however complex ACME might be it's better than not supporting TLS
There's no good reason to serve a blog over TLS. You're not handling sensitive data, so unencrypted is just fine.
The reason is to prevent your site from becoming a watering hole where malicious actors use it to inject malware into the browsers of your users.
TLS isn't for you, it's for your readers.
but like, who’s doing that?
Maybe the answer is disabling the JS runtime on non-TLS sites, maybe that has the added benefit of making the web (documents and “posters”) light again.
SMS is unencrypted, phone calls are unencrypted- yet we don’t worry nearly as much about people injecting content or modifying things. Because we trust out providers, largely, but the capability 100% exists for that; with no actual recourse. With browsing the internet we do have recourse- optionally use a VPN.
All of this security theatre is just moving the trust around, I would much rather make laws that protect the integrity of traffic sent via ISPs than add to the computational waste from military grade encrypting the local menu for the pizza shop.
Worse still, the pizza shop won’t go through the effort so they either won’t bother having a website or will put it on facebook or some other crazy centralised platform.
I’ll tell you something, I trust my ISP (Bahnhof- famous for protecting thepiratebay) a lot more than I trust Facebook not to do weird moderation activities.
> You're not handling sensitive data, so unencrypted is just fine.
Except when an adversary MITMs your site and injects an attack to one of your readers:
* https://www.infoworld.com/article/2188091/uk-spy-agency-uses...
Further: tapping glass is a thing, and if the only traffic that is encrypted is the "important" or "sensitive" stuff, then it sticks out in the flow, and so attackers know to focus just on that. If all traffic is encrypted, then it's much harder for attackers to figure out what is important and what is not.
So by encrypting your "unimportant" data you add more noise that has to be sifted through.
relevant blog post and HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146291
Do you consider only religion, health and political data to be sensitive??
What someone chooses to read on a blog is no one else's business, and can be very sensitive.
Why? I can understand the argument that you don’t want an ISP or a middlebox injecting ads or scripts (valid I think even if I’ve never encountered it to my knowledge), but otherwise you’re publishing content intended for the world. There’s presumably nothing especially sensitive that you need to hide on the wire.
> (valid I think even if I’ve never encountered it to my knowledge)
Visitors to your website may encounter it. Do you not care that your visitors may be seeing ads?
You're also leaking what your visitors are reading to their ISPs and governments. Maybe you don't consider anything you write about to be remotely sensitive, but how critically do you examine that with every new piece you write?
If you wrote something which could be sensitive to readers in some parts of the world (something about circumventing censorship, something critical of some religion, something involving abortion or other forms of healthcare that some governments are cracking down on), do you then add SSL at that point? Or do you refrain from publishing it?
Personally, I like the freedom to just not think about these things. I can write about whatever I want, however controversial it might be in some regions, no matter how dangerous it is for some people to be found reading about it, and be confident that my readers can expect at least a baseline of safety because my blog, like pretty much every other in the world today, uses cryptography to ensure that governments and ISPs can't use deep packet inspection to scan the words they read or use MITM to inject things into my blog. Does it really matter? Well probably not for my site specifically, but across all the blogs and websites in the world and all the visitors in the world, that's a whole lot of "probably not"s which all combine together into a huge "almost definitely".
I agree but SSL doesn't encrypt the IP so there is that information leaked. That isn't to say don't use SSL but more it isn't 100% privacy protection from middlemen.
Yeah, it's unfortunate that it doesn't hide the IP address you connect to. But my thinking is: for someone to hypothetically get in trouble for reading my blog if I don't use SSL, their ISP/government just needs to inspect the packets they receive and scan for particular words or phrases, and they'll have hard proof that the person accessed a particular article. If I use SSL, those governments must have specifically flagged my web server's IP address, and they won't have any hard proof about what content was accessed.
So while it's not perfect, it's pretty good, and a very low investment for me as a website owner :)
Not there being 100% protection doesn't make it pointless to have any protection
Why? The days of MITM boxes injecting content into HTTP traffic are basically over, and frankly they never were a thing in my part of the world.
I see no other reason to serve content over HTTPS.
> Why? The days of MITM boxes injecting content into HTTP traffic are basically over
The reason you don't see many MITM boxes injecting content into HTTP anymore is because of widespread HTTPS adoption and browsers taking steps to distrust HTTP, making MITM injection a near-useless tactic.
(This rhymes with the observation that some people now perceive Y2K as overhyped fear-mongering that amounted to nothing, without understanding that immense work happened behind the scenes to avert problems.)
How do browsers distrust HTTP, exactly?
They show any site served over HTTP as explicitly not secure in the address bar (making HTTPS the "default" and HTTP the visibly dangerous option), they limit many web APIs to sites served over HTTPS ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Secure...) , https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Secure... ), they block or upgrade mixed-content by default (HTTPS sites cannot request HTTP-only resources anymore), they require HTTPS for HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, they increasingly attempt HTTPS to a site first even if linked/typed as http, they warn about downloads over http, and they're continuing to ratchet up such measures over time.
If browser vendors really cared, they would disable javascript on non-https sites.
> they increasingly attempt HTTPS to a site first even if linked/typed as http
And can generally be configured by the user not to downgrade to http without an explicit prompt.
Honestly I disagree with the refusal to support various APIs over http. Making the (configurable last I checked) prompt mandatory per browser session would have sufficed to push all mainstream sites to strictly https.
> And can generally be configured by the user not to downgrade to http without an explicit prompt.
Absolutely, and this works quite well on the current web.
> Honestly I disagree with the refusal to support various APIs over http.
There are multiple good reasons to do so. Part of it is pushing people to HTTPS; part of it is the observation that if you allow an API over HTTP, you're allowing that API to any attacker.
> if you allow an API over HTTP, you're allowing that API to any attacker.
In the scenario I described you're doing that only after the user has explicitly opted in on a case by case basis, and you're forcing a per-session nag on them in order to coerce mainstream website operators to adopt the secure default.
At that point it's functionally slightly more obtuse than adding an exception for a certificate (because those are persistent). Rejecting the latter on the basis of security is adopting a position that no amount of user discretion is acceptable. At least personally I'm comfortable disagreeing with that.
More generally, I support secure defaults but almost invariably disagree with disallowing users to shoot themselves in the foot. As an example, I expect a stern warning if I attempt to uninstall my kernel but I also expect the software on my device to do exactly what I tell it to 100% of the time regardless of what the developers might have thought was best for me.