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Stop Breaking TLS

(www.markround.com)
170 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.401s | source
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gschizas ◴[] No.46215801[source]
The fact that most tools have completely different ways to allow them to add certificates is the biggest pain. Git, Python and Rust also have large issues. Git doesn't default to "http.schannel". Python (or rather requests, or maybe urllib3) only looks at its own certificate store, and I have no idea how Rust does this (well, I use uv, and it has its own problems - I know about the --use-native-tls flag, but it should be a default at the least).
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jeroenhd ◴[] No.46216859[source]
On Android, macOS/iOS, and Windows, this is a solved problem. Only on the extremely fragmented Linux/Posix runtimes do these problems surface.

Rust's solution is "it depends". You can use OpenSSL (system or statically compiled) or rustls (statically compiled with your own CA roots, system CA roots, or WebPKI CA roots).

I'm afraid that until the *ix operating systems come out with a new POSIX-like definition that stabilises a TLS API, regardless of whether that's the OpenSSL API, the WolfSSL API, or GnuTLS, we'll have to keep hacking around in APIs that need to be compatible with arbitrary TLS configurations. Alternatively, running applications through Waydroid/Wine will work just fine if Linux runtimes can't get their shit together.

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1. crote ◴[] No.46229747[source]
> On Android, macOS/iOS, and Windows, this is a solved problem.

Is it, though? It is absolutely trivial for an Android app (like the one you use for banking) to pin a specific CA or even a specific server certificate, and as far as I'm aware it is pretty much impossible to universally override this.

In fact, by default Android apps don't accept any user-installed certs. It uses separate stores for system-installed CA roots and user-installed CA roots, and since Android 7.0 the default is to only include the system-installed store. Apps have to explicitly opt-in to trusting the user-installed store.