Wandering Thoughts archives

2017-07-20

HTTPS is a legacy protocol

Ted Unangst recently wrote moving to https (via), in which he gave us the following (in his usual inimitable style):

On the security front, however, there may be a few things to mention. Curiously, some browsers react to the addition of encryption to a website by issuing a security warning. Yesterday, reading this page in plaintext was perfectly fine, but today, add some AES to the mix, and it’s a terrible menace, unfit for even casual viewing. But fill out the right forms and ask the right people and we can fix that, right?

(You may have trouble reading Ted's post, especially on mobile devices.)

One way to look at this situation is to observe that HTTPS today is a legacy protocol, much like every other widely deployed Internet protocol. Every widely deployed protocol, HTTPS included, is at least somewhat old (because it takes time to get widely deployed), and that means that they're all encrusted with at least some old decisions that we're now stuck with in the name of backwards compatibility. What we end up with is almost never what people would design if they were to develop these protocols from scratch today.

A modern version of HTTP(S) would probably be encrypted from the start regardless of whether the web site had a certificate, as encryption has become much more important today. This isn't just because we're in a post-Snowden world; it's also because today's Internet has become a place full of creepy ad-driven surveillance and privacy invasion, where ISPs are one of your enemies. When semi-passive eavesdroppers are demonstrably more or less everywhere, pervasive encryption is a priority for a whole bunch of people for all sorts of reasons, both for privacy and for integrity of what gets transferred.

But here on the legacy web, our only path to encryption is with HTTPS, and HTTPS comes with encryption tightly coupled to web site authentication. In theory you could split them apart by fiat with browser and web server cooperation (eg); in practice there's a chicken and egg problem with how old and new browsers interact with various sorts of sites, and how users and various sorts of middleware software expect HTTP and HTTPS links and traffic to behave. At this point there may not be any way out of the tangle of history and people's expectations. That HTTPS is a legacy protocol means that we're kind of stuck with some things that are less than ideal, including this one.

(I don't know what the initial HTTPS and SSL threat model was, but I suspect that the Netscape people involved didn't foresee anything close to the modern web environment we've wound up with.)

So in short, we're stuck with a situation where adding some AES to your website does indeed involve making it into a horrible menace unless you ask the right people. This isn't because it's particularly sensible; it's because that's how things evolved, for better or worse. We can mock the silliness of the result if we want to (although every legacy protocol has issues like this), but the only real way to do better is to destroy backwards compatibility. Some people are broadly fine with this sort of move, but a lot of people aren't, and it's very hard to pull off successfully in a diverse ecology where no single party has strong control.

(It's not useless to point out the absurdity yet again, not exactly, but it is shooting well-known fish in a barrel. This is not a new issue and, as mentioned, it's not likely that it's ever going to be fixed. But Ted Unangst does write entertaining rants.)

HTTPSLegacyProtocol written at 00:30:53; Add Comment


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