It feels like just yesterday I was paying for certs, or worst, just running without.
Can't believe its been ten years.
replies(1):
Can't believe its been ten years.
TLS is fairly computationally intensive - sure, not a big deal now because everyone is using superfast devices but try browsing the internet with a Pentium 4 or something. You won't be able to because there is no AES instruction set support accelerating the keyshake so it's hilariously slow.
It also encourages memoryholing old websites which aren't maintained - priceless knowledge is often lost because websites go down because no one is maintaining them. On my hard drive, I have a fair amount of stuff which I'm reasonably confident doesn't exist anywhere on the Internet anymore.... if my drives fail, that knowledge will be lost forever.
It is also a very centralised model - if I want to host a website, why do third parties need to issue a certificate for it just so people can connect to it?
It also discourages naive experimentation - sure, if you know how, you can MitM your own connection but for the not very technical but curious user, that's probably an insurmountable roadblock.
The fundamental problem is a question of trust. There’s three ways:
* Well known validation authority (the public TLS model)
* TOFU (the default SSH model)
* Pre-distribute your public keys (the self-signed certificate model)
Are there any alternatives?
If your requirement is that you don’t want to trust a third party, then don’t. You can use self-signed certificates and become your own root of trust. But I think expecting the average user to manually curate their roots of trust is a clearly terrible security UX.
I don’t see how it has too many advantages (for the internet) over creating your own CA. If you have a mutually trusted group of people, then they can all share the private key and sign whatever they trust.
I think the main problem is that it doesn’t scale. If party A and party B who have never communicated before want to communicate securely (let’s say from completely different countries), there’s no way they would be able to without a bridge. With central TLS, despite the downsides, that is seamless.