Because those ephemeral LE certificates are such a great idea...
replies(6):
Then, when you have only two or three big SSL providers, it's way easier to shut someone off by denying them a certificate, and see their site vanish in mere weeks.
- We went from the vast majority of traffic being unencrypted, allowing any passive attacker (from nation state to script kiddie sitting in the coffee shop) to snoop and any active attacker to trivially tamper with it, to all but a vanishing minority of connections being strongly encrypted. The scare tactics used to sell VPNs in YouTube ads used to all be true, and no longer are, due to this.
- We went from TLS certificates being unaffordable to hobbyists to TLS certificates being not only free, but trivial to automatically obtain.
- We went from a CA ecosystem where only commercial alternatives exist to one where the main CA is a nonprofit run by a foundation consisting mostly of strong proponents of Internet freedom.
- Even if you count ZeroSSL and Let's Encrypt as US-controlled, there is at least one free non-US alternative using the same protocol, i.e. suitable as a drop-in replacement (https://www.actalis.com/subscription).
- Plenty of other paid but affordable alternatives exist from countless countries, and the ecosystem seems to be getting better, not worse.
- While many other paths have been used to attempt to censor web sites, I haven't seen the certificate system used for this frequently (I'm sure there are individual court orders somewhere).
- If the US wanted to put its full weight behind getting a site off the Internet, it would have other levers that would be equally or more effective.
- Most Internet freedom advocates recognize that the migration to HTTPS was a really, really good thing.
- We now provide a completely free certs for a malicious web-sites
- Degraded encryption value so much it's not even indicated anymore (remember the green bar for EV?)
- Pavlov-trained everyone to dumb-click through 'this page is not secure' warnings
- SNI exists and even without it anything not on CDN is blocked very easily
This is fundamentally a naive understanding of both security and certificates. Paying money absolutely makes people trustworthy because it's prohibitive to do it at scale. You might have one paid malicious certificate but you can have thousands of free ones. The one malicious domain gets banned, the thousands are whack-a-mole forever.
Further, certificates used to indicate identity in more than a "the domain you are connected to" sense. There was a big PR campaign to wreck EV certs but EV certs generally were extremely secure. And even Google, who most loudly complained about EV, has reintroduced the Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) to replace it and use for new things like BIMI.
Do we have any statistics for how many people are actually doing this? Such warnings are so rare in my experience that, by default, I don't trust a site that has no SSL/expired or invalid certs and won't click through if I see that warning.
I don't much care about BIMI. People keep trying to resuscitate that particular dead dog (email security), maybe one day they will succeed but I don't expect to be involved.
Malicious websites never had a problem buying certs before. Sure, the bar is lower now, but I don't think it was a particularly meaningful bar before. Besides, the most common ways to get malicious websites shut down are to get their webhost to cut them off, or get a court order to seize their domain name. Getting their TLS cert revoked isn't common, and doesn't really do the job anyway.
> Degraded encryption value so much it's not even indicated anymore (remember the green bar for EV?)
No, we've degraded the identity verification afforded by EV and those former browser features. Remember that the promise of SSL/TLS was two things: 1) your traffic is private, 2) it verifies that the server you thought you were contacting is actually the one you reached.
I think (2) was always going to be difficult: either you make it hard and expensive to acquire TLS certificates, and (2) has value, or you don't, and it doesn't. I think pervasive encryption is way more important than site owner identity validation. And I don't think the value of an EV cert was even all that high back when browsers called them out in their UI. There are lots of examples of people trivially managing to get an EV cert from somewhere, with their locally-registered "Stripe, LLC" or whatever in the "validated" company name field of their cert.
> Pavlov-trained everyone to dumb-click through 'this page is not secure' warnings
Not sure what that has to do with this. That was more of a problem back when we didn't have Let's Encrypt, so lots of people were using self-signed certs, or let their certs expire and didn't fix it, or whatever. These days I expect certificate warnings are fairly rare, and so users might actually start paying attention to them again.
> SNI exists and even without it anything not on CDN is blocked very easily
ESNI also exists, and while not being available everywhere, it'll get there. But this is a bizarre complaint, as it's entirely trivial to block traffic when there's no TLS at all.
Browser vendors removed the extra UI around EV certs not because certs in general are easier to get, but because the identity "guarantee" afforded to EV certs was fairly easy to spoof. EV certs still exist, and you can foolishly pay for one if you want. Free ACME-provided certs has nothing to do with this.
Cybercriminals work at scale. The opinion you shared here is why Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are so easy to use for cybercrime. It's incredibly easy to hide bad behavior in cheap, disposable attempts on free accounts.
Cost virtually eliminates abuse. Bad actors are fronting effort and ideally small amounts of money to effectively bet on a high return. You make the cost to attempt high, it isn't worth it. Apart from some high profile blogs demonstrating the risk, EV certs have to my knowledge never been used maliciously, and hiding them from the browser bar just makes useful, high quality data about the trustworthiness of a site buried behind hidden menus.
Wrong. Company names are not guaranteed to be unique per-country.
The main issue you are missing is that putting undeserved trust in things like DV / EV flags greatly increase the value of such attacks. If users are trained to blindly trust that shiny green bar, the odd attacker will be able to walk away with an absolute fortune. Nobody will be suspicious about that page, because Green Bar. Why is the "bank" asking odd questions? Who cares, it had a Green Bar, so it must be legitimate.
Why bother with hundreds of small attacks when one big one will make you rich?
Like, you need to realize most phishing scammers are perfectly happy to make a bankofamericaaa.glitch.me page, because it's free, and without any good indicators for the legitimate bank to use like EV, really doesn't look that much different to the nontechnical customer than bankofamerica.com.