== The browser security dilemma So Pete Zaitcev ran into the failure mode of [[modern browsers being strict about security BrowsersAndStrictHTTPS]], which is that [[the browser locks you out of something that you need to access http://zaitcev.livejournal.com/234465.html]]. The only thing I'm much surprised about is that it happened to Pete Zaitcev before it happened to me. On the one hand, this is really frustrating when it happens to you; on the other hand, the browsers are caught on the horns of a real security dilemma here. To simplify, there are two sorts of browser users; let us call them sysadmins and ordinary people. Sysadmins both know what they're doing and deal with broken cryptography things on a not infrequent basis, such as device management websites that only support terribly outdated cryptography (say SSLv3 only), or have only weak certificates or keys (512 bytes only, yes really), or their certificate has long since expired and are for the wrong name anyways. As a result, sysadmins both want ways to override TLS failures and can (in theory) be trusted to use them safely. By contrast, ordinary people both don't normally encounter broken cryptography and don't really know enough to handle it safely if they do. In an ideal world, a browser would be able to tell which sort of person you were and give you an appropriate interface. In this less than ideal world, what browser vendors have discovered is that if you expose a 'sysadmin' interface in basically any way, ordinary people will eventually wind up using it for TLS failures that they definitely should not override. It doesn't matter how well you hide it; sooner or later someone will find it and write it up on the Internet and search engines will index it and people will search for it and navigate the ten steps necessary to enable it (and ignore your scary warnings in the process). If we have learned anything, we've learned that people are extremely motivated to get to their websites and are willing to jump through all sorts of hoops to do so. Even when this is a terrible idea. Since ordinary people vastly outnumber sysadmins, browsers are increasingly opting to throw sysadmins under the bus (ie, completely not supporting our need to override these checks some of the time). At the moment, some major browsers are less strict than others, but I suspect that this will pass and sooner or later Chrome too will give me and Pete Zaitcev no option here. Maybe we'll still be able to rely on more obscure things (on Linux) like Konqueror, at least if they're functional enough to handle the device management websites and IPMIs and so on that I need to deal with. (Failing that, there may come a day where I keep around an ancient copy of Firefox to handle such sites, in just the same way that I keep around an ancient copy of Java to deal with various Java based 'KVM over IP' IPMI things. Don't worry, my ancient Java isn't wired up as an applet and only works in a non-default browser setup in the first place.)