Oh JSON.
For those unfamiliar with the reason here, it’s that JSON parsers cannot be relied upon to treat numbers properly. Is 4723476276172647362476274672164762476438 a valid JSON number? Yes, of course it is. What will a JSON parser due with it? Silently truncate it to a 64-bit or 63-bit integer, or a float, probably or if you’re very lucky emit an error (a good JSON decoder written in a sane language like Common Lisp would of course just return the number, but few of us are so lucky).
So the only way to reliably get large integers into and out of JSON is to encode them as something else. Base64-encoded big-endian bytes is not a terrible choice. Silently doing the wrong thing is the root of many security errors, so it not wrong to treat every number in the protocol this way. Of course, then one loses the readability of JSON.
JSON is better than XML, but it really isn’t great. Canonical S-expressions would have been far preferable, but for whatever reason the world didn’t go that way.
I feel like not understanding why JSON won out is being intentionally obtuse. JSON can easily be hand written, edited, and read for most data. Canonical S-expressions are not as easy to read and much harder to write by hand; having to prefix every atom with a length makes is very tedious to write by hand. If you have a JSON object you want to hand edit, you can just type... for an Canonical S-expression, you have to count how many characters you are typing/deleting, and then update the prefix.
You might not think the ability to hand generate, read, and edit is important, but I am pretty sure that is a big reason JSON has won in the end.
Oh, and the Ruby JSON parser handles that large number just fine.
You are going way out of your way to try to come up with ways to rationalize why JSON was a success. The ugly truth is far simpler than what you're trying to sell: it was valid JavaScript. JavaScript WebApps could parse JSON with a call to eval(). No deserialization madness like XML, no need to import a parser. Just fetch a file, pass it to eval(), and you're done.
Perhaps, but it's not a major concern when you control both the JavaScript frontend and whatever backend it consumes. In fact, arguably this technique is still pretty much in use today with the way WebApps get a hold of CSRF tokens. In this scenario security is a lesser concern than, say, input validation.
Not really. JSON's mass adoption is tied to JavaScript's mass adoption, where sheer convenience and practicality dictates it's whole history most of the current state. Sending JavaScript fragments from the backend is a technique that didn't really stopped being used just because someone rolled out a JSON parser.
I think some people feel compelled to retroactively make this whole thing more refined and elegant because for some the ugly truth is hard to swallow.
So of course, ACME is based around a format whose entire reason d'etre is being written and read by hand.
It's weird.
[1]: although being easy to read by humans is an advantage when debugging why something isn't working.
I didn’t feel like my comment was the right place to shill for an alternative, but rather to complain about JSON. But since you raise it.
> JSON can easily be hand written, edited, and read for most data.
So can canonical S-expressions!
> Canonical S-expressions are not as easy to read and much harder to write by hand; having to prefix every atom with a length makes is very tedious to write by hand.
Which is why the advanced representation exists. I contend that this:
(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed
(detail "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected")
(subproblems ((urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed
(detail "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"")
(identifier (dns _example.org)))
(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier
(detail "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"")
(identifier (dns example.net))))))
{
"type": "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed",
"detail": "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected",
"subproblems": [
{
"type": "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed",
"detail": "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"",
"identifier": {
"type": "dns",
"value": "_example.org"
}
},
{
"type": "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier",
"detail": "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"",
"identifier": {
"type": "dns",
"value": "example.net"
}
}
]
}
As you can see, no you do not.
As for s-expressions vs json, there are pros and cons to each. S-expressions don't have any way to encode type information in the data itself, you need a schema to know if a certain value should be treated as a number or a string. And it's subjective which is more readable.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_S-expressions
I’ve always used ‘canonical S-expressions’ to refer to Rivest’s S-expressions proposal: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-rivest-sexp-13.html, a proposal which has canonical, basic transport & advanced transport representations which are all equivalent to one another (i.e., every advanced transport representation has a single canonical representation). I don’t know where I first saw it, but perhaps it was intended to distinguish from other S-expressions such as Lisp’s or Scheme’s?
Maybe I should refer to them as ‘Rivest S-expressions’ or ‘SPKI S-expressions’ instead.
> S-expressions don't have any way to encode type information in the data itself, you need a schema to know if a certain value should be treated as a number or a string.
Neither does JSON, as this whole thread indicates. This applies to other data types, too: while a Rivest expression could be
(date [iso8601]2025-05-24T12:37:21Z)
{
"date": "2025-05-24T12:37:21Z"
}
I really disagree. The whole reason YAML exists is to make JSON more readable. Within limits, the more data one can have in a screenful of text, the better. JSON is so terribly verbose if pretty-printed that it takes up screens and screens of text to represent a small amount of data — and when not pretty-printed, it is close to trying to read a memory trace.
Edit: updated link to the January 2025 proposal.
But that perhaps hints at some reasons that formats like JSON tend to win popularity contests over formats like Rivest's. JSON is a single format for authoring and reading, which doesn't address transport at all. The name is short, pronounceable (vs. "spikky" perhaps?), and clearly refers to one thing - there's no ambiguity about whether you might be talking about a transport encoding instead,
I'm not saying these are good reasons to adopt JSON over SPKI, just that there's a level of ambition in Rivest's proposal which is a poor match for how adoption tends to work in the real world.
There are several mechanism for JSON transport encoding - including plain old gzip, but also more specific formats like MessagePack. There isn't one single standard for it, but as it turns out that really isn't that important.
Arguably there's a kind of violation of separation of concerns happening in a proposal that tries to define all these things at once: "a canonical form ... two transport representations, and ... an advanced format".
But still, I think if the original JSON spec had been longer and more comprehensive, along the lines of Rivest's, that could have limited JSON's popularity, or resulted in people just ignoring parts of it and focusing on the parts they found useful.
The original JSON RFC-4627 was about 1/3rd the size of the original Rivest draft (a body of 260 lines vs. 750); it defines a single representation instead of four; and e.g. the section on "Encoding" is just 3 sentences. Here it is, for reference: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt
I’m sure you’re right. If even this simple spec exceeded what people would actually use as a real standard, surely anything beyond that would also be left by the wayside.
Great, this looks like JSON. Is it JSON5? Does it expect bigint support? Can I use escape chars?
To your specific points:
1. JSON5 didn't exist when JSON adoption occurred, and in any case they're pretty easy to tell apart, because JSON requires keys to be quoted. This is a non-problem. Why do you think it might matter? Not to mention that the existence of some other format that resembles JSON is hardly a reflection on JSON itself, except perhaps as a compliment to its perceived usefulness.
2. Bigint support is not a requirement that most people have. It makes no difference to adoption.
3. Escape character handling is pretty well defined in ECMA 404. Your point is so obscure I don't even know specifically what you might be referring to.
927 can be avoided, but it's way harder than it seems, which is why we have the proliferation of standards that fail to become universal.
But, I mean, they're basically isomorphic with like 2 things exchanges ({} and [] instead of (); implicit vs explicit keys/types).
S expressions may well be better. But I don’t think S expressions are better enough to be able to overcome json’s inertia.
(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed
(detail "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected")
(subproblems ((urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed
(detail "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"")
(identifier (dns _example.org)))
(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier
(detail "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"")
(identifier (dns example.net))))))
but, i would also argue that the two examples are not equivalent. what is explicitly specified as "type" and "value" in the json data, is implied in the s-expression data. either format is fine, but it would be better to compare like for like:
an s-expression equivalent for the json example would look like this:
((type urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed)
(detail "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected)
(subproblems
((type urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed)
(detail "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"")
(identifier
(type dns)
(value _example.org)))
((type urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier)
(detail "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"")
(identifier
(type dns)
(value example.net)))))
{
"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed":
{
"detail": "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected",
"subproblems":
[
"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed":
{
"detail": "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"",
"identifier":
{
"dns": "_example.org"
}
},
"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier"
{
"detail": "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"",
"identifier":
{
"dns": "example.net"
}
}
]
}
}
{"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed": {
"detail": "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected",
"subproblems": [
"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed": {
"detail": "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"",
"identifier": {
"dns": "_example.org" }},
"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier": {
"detail": "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"",
"identifier": {
"dns": "example.net" }}]}}
because if we spread out the s-expression example:
(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed
(detail "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected")
(subproblems
((urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed
(detail "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"")
(identifier
(dns _example.org)
)
)
(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier
(detail "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"")
(identifier
(dns example.net)
)
)
)
)
)
It's not for me. I'd literally take anything over csexps. Like there is nothing that I'd prefer it to. If it's the only format around, then I'll just roll my own.
oh boi, that's some Lisp-like vs C-like level of holywar you just uncovered there
and wooow my opinion is opposite of yours
Readability is a function of the reader, not the medium.
You don't do that, any more than you read or write machine code in binary. You read and write regular S-expressions (or assembly code) and you translate that into and out of canonical S expressions (or machine code) with a tool (an assembler/disassembler).
Reading happens even more times. I am constantly printing out API responses when I am coding, verifying what I am seeing matches what I am expecting, or trying to get an idea of the structure of something. Sure, you can tell me I shouldn’t do this and I should just read a spec, but in my experience it is often much faster just to read the JSON directly. Sometimes the spec is outdated, just plain wrong, or doesn’t exist. Being able to read the JSON is a regular part of my day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression
A canonical S-expression is a binary format, intended to be both generated and parsed by machines, not humans:
Of course, if you're doing this in JS and have reasons to think the resulting number may be larger than the precision of a double, you have a huge problem either way. Just as you would if you were writing this in C and thought the number may be larger than what can fit in a long long. But that's true regardless of how you represent it in JSON.
The DER encoding used in the TLS certificates uses the big endian binary format. OpenSSL API wants the big endian binary too.
The format used by this protocol is a simple one.
It's almost exactly the format that is needed to use these numbers, except JSON can't store binary data directly. Converting binary to base 64 is a simple operation (just bit twiddling, no division), and it's easier than converting arbitrarily large numbers between base 2 and base 10. The 17-bit value happens to be an easy one, but other values may need thousands of bits.
It would be silly for the sender and recipient to need to use a BigNum library when the sender has the bytes and the recipient wants the bytes, and neither has use for a decimal number.
https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.numeric-strings...
json.Number is (almost) my “favorite” arbitrary decimal: https://github.com/ncruces/decimal?tab=readme-ov-file#decima...
I'm half joking, but I'm not sure why S-expressions would be better here. There are LISPs that don't do arbitrary precision math.
Yup, and if you’re using JSON in Go you really do need to be using Number exclusively. Anything else will lead to pain.
> I'm half joking, but I'm not sure why S-expressions would be better here. There are LISPs that don't do arbitrary precision math.
Sure, but I’m referring specifically to https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-rivest-sexp-13.html, which only has lists and bytes, and so number are always just strings and it’s up to the program to interpret them.
Now, S-expressions as used for programming languages such as Lisp do have numbers, but again Lisp has bignums. As for parsers of Lisp S-expressions written in other languages: if they want to comply with the standard, they need to support bignums.
If types other than string and a list bother you, why don't you stick with those types in JSON?
I'd be happy to use s-expressions instead :) Though to GP's point, I suppose we might then end up with JS s-expression parsers that still treat ints and floats interchangeably.
JSON could easily be extended to support them - but there’s no standards body with the authority to make a change like that. So we’re probably stuck with json as-is forever. I really hope something better comes along that we can all agree on before I die of old age.
While we’re at it, I’d also love a way to embed binary data in json. And a canonical way to represent dates. And comments. And I’d like a sane, consistent way to express sum types. And sets and maps (with non string keys) - which JavaScript also natively supports. Sigh.
JSON is a victim of its success: it has become too big to fail, and too big to improve.
The fact remains that json doesn’t have native support for any of this stuff. I want something json-like which supports all this stuff natively. I don’t want to have to figure out if some binary data is base64 encoded or hex encoded or whatever, and hack around jackson or serde or javascript to encode and decode my objects properly. Features like this should be built in.
In code you control you can choose to use JSON5: https://json5.org/
For RSA-4096, the modulus is 4096 bits = 512 bytes in binary, which (for my test key) is 684 characters in base64 or 1233 characters in decimal. So the base64 version is much smaller.
Base64 is also more efficient to deal with. An RSA implementation will typically work with the numbers in binary form, so for the base64 encoding you just need to convert the bytes, which is a simple O(n) transformation. Converting the number between binary and decimal, on the other hand, is O(n^2) if done naively, or O(some complicated expression bigger than n log n) if done optimally.
Besides computational complexity, there's also implementation complexity. Base conversion is an algorithm that you normally don't have to implement as part of an RSA implementation. You might argue that it's not hard to find some library to do base conversion for you. Some programming languages even have built-in bigint types. But you typically want to avoid using general-purpose bigint implementations for cryptography. You want to stick to cryptographic libraries, which typically aim to make all operations constant-time to avoid timing side channels. Indeed, the apparent ease-of-use of decimal would arguably be a bad thing since it would encourage implementors to just use a standard bigint type to carry the values around.
You could argue that the same concern applies to base64, but it should be relatively safe to use a naive implementation of base64, since it's going to be a straightforward linear scan over the bytes with less room for timing side channels (though not none).
Why you wouldn't just use the hexadecimal that everyone else seems to use I don't know. There seems to be a rather arbitrary cutoff where people prefer base64 to hexadecimal.
Python 3.13.3 (main, May 21 2025, 07:49:52) [GCC 14.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
information.
>>> import json
>>>
json.loads('47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000')
47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 >> import json, decimal
>> j = "47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
>> json.loads(j, parse_float=decimal.Decimal, parse_int=decimal.Decimal)
Decimal('47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000')
>> import json
>> j = "0.47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
>> json.loads(j)
0.47234762761726473
>> import json, decimal
>> j = "0.47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
>> json.loads(j, parse_float=decimal.Decimal, parse_int=decimal.Decimal)
Decimal('0.47234762761726473624762746721647624764380000000000000000000000000000000000000000000') >>> s="1"+"0"*4300
>>> json.loads(s)
...
ValueError: Exceeds the limit (4300 digits) for integer string conversion:
value has 4301 digits; use sys.set_int_max_str_digits() to increase the limit
Relevant discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32753235
Your sibling comment suggests using decimal.Decimal which handles parsing >4300 digit numbers (by default).
But yea, as a Clojure guy sexprs or EDN would be much better.
Probably there are types not every parser/language can accept, but at least it could throw a meaningful error instead of guessing or even truncating the value.
Haskell’s Aeson library is one of the few exceptions I’ve seen, since it only parses numbers to ‘Scientific’s (essentially a kind of bigint for rationals.) This makes the API very safe, but also incredibly annoying to use if you want to just munge some integers, since you’re forced to handle the error case of the unbounded values not fitting in your fixed-size integer values.
Most programmers likely simply either don’t consider that case, or don’t want to have to deal with it, so bad JSON libraries are the default.
There's an element of "worse is better" here [1]. JSON overtook XML exactly because it's so simple and solves for the social element of communication between disparate projects with wildly different philosophies, like UNIX byte-oriented I/O streams, or like the C calling conventions.
---
[0] https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...
The problem with your solution is that it’s also not portable for the same reason (it’s not part of the standard), and the reason that it wasn’t done that way in the first place is because it wouldn’t map to those initial js types!
FYI, you can easily work around this by using replacer and revivers that are part of the standards for stringify and parse and treat numbers differently. But again, the json isn’t portable to places without those replacer/revivers.
I.e, the real problem is treating something that looks like json as json by using standards compliant json parsers - not the apparent structure of the format itself. You could fix this problem in an instant by calling it something other than JSON, but people will see it and still use a JSON parser because it looks like JSON, not because it is JSON.
Kinda blows my mind that the accepted behavior is to just overflow and not raise an exception.
I try to stick to strings for anything that's not a 32 bit int now.
In practice, "alg:none" is a headache and everyone involved should be ashamed.
JSON is better than XML, but it really isn’t great.
It's a shame JSON parsers usually default to performance rather than correctness, by using bignums for numbers.
> This specification allows implementations to set limits on the range and precision of numbers accepted
JSON is a terrible interoperability standard.
Converting that text to _any_ kind of numerical value is outside the scope of the specification. (At least the JSON.org specification, the RFC tries to say more.)
As a textural format, when you use it for data interchange between different platforms, you should ensure that the endpoints agree on the _interpretation_, otherwise they won't see the same data.
Again outside of the scope of the JSON specification.
Similarly to a "schema-less" DBMS -- you will still have a schema, it will just be in your application code, not enforced by the DBMS.
JSON is a nice balance between convenience and restrictions, but it's still a compromise.
That sentence has four negations and I honestly can't figure out what it means.
>That sentence has four negations and I honestly can't figure out what it means.
This example is halfway as bad as the one Orwell gives in my favorite essay, "Politics the the English Language"¹.
Compare and contrast:
>I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Orwell has much to say about either.
_____
¹https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
I am not, indeed, sure*,* whether it is not true to say that the Milton *(*who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley*)* had not become *-* out of an experience *-* ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect*,* which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
(It seems this claim is not true, but at least that’s what the sentence means.)
{X} = JSON parsers technically [are] not following the standard if {reason}
{reason} = [JSON parsers] don't reliably store a number that {what kind of number?}
{what kind of number} = number that is not representable by a IEEE754 double precision float
seems simple
JSON is still hack garbage compared to XML from the turn of the millennia. Like most dominant tech standards, JSON took hold purely because many developers are intellectually lazy and it was easier to slam some sloppy JSON together than to understand XML.
XML with XSD, XPath and XQuery is simply a glorious combination.
The salt here is deserved! JSON Web Signatures are a gnarly format, and the ACME API is pretty enthusiastic about being RESTful.
It’s not what I’d design. I think a lot of that came via the IETF wanting to use other IETF standards, and a dash of design-by-committee.
A few libraries (for JWS, JSON and HTTP) go a long way to making it more pleasant but those libraries themselves aren’t always that nice, especially in C.
I’m working on an interactive client and accompanying documentation to help here too, because the RFC language is a bit dense and often refers to other documents too.
They are??
As someone who wallows in ASN.1, Kerberos, and PKI, I don't find JWS so "gnarly". Even if you're open-coding a JSON Web Signature it will be easier than to open-code S/MIME, CMS, Kerberos, etc. Can you explain what is so gnarly about JWS?
Mind you, there are problems with JWT. Mainly that HTTP user-agents don't know how to fetch the darned things because there is not standard for how to find out how to fetch the darned things, when you should honor a request for them, etc.
https://auth0.com/blog/critical-vulnerabilities-in-json-web-...
Implementations can be written securely, but it's too easy to make mistakes.
Yeah, there's worse stuff from the 90s around, but JOSE and ACME is newer than that - we could have done better!
Alas, it's not changing now.
I think ASN.1 has some warts, but I think a lot of the problems with DER are actually in creaky old tools. People seem way happier with Protobuf, for example: I think that's largely down to tooling.
I think Protocol Buffers is a disaster. Its syntax is worse than ASN.1 because you're required to write in tags, and it is a TLV encoding very similar to DER so... why _why_ does PB exist? Don't tell me it's because there were no ASN.1 tools around -- there were no PB tools around either!
Just because ASN.1 and friends are exceptionally bad, it does not mean that Json Web * cannot be bad also.
I do not. This sort of codec complexity can't be avoided. And ASN.1 is NOT "exceptionally bad" -- I rather like ASN.1. The point was not "wait till you see ASN.1", but "wait till you see Kerberos" because Kerberos requires a very large amount of client-side smarts -- too much really because it's got more than 30 years of cruft.
"Somehow, a couple of weeks ago, I found this other site which claimed to be better than LE and which used relatively simple HTTP requests without a bunch of funny data types."
"This is when the fine print finally appeared. This service only lets you mint 90 day certificates on the free tier. Also, you can only do three of them. Then you're done. 270 days for one domain or 3 domains for 90 days, and then you're screwed. Isn't that great? "
She don't mention what this "other site" is.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
I had to stop and Google that, wondering if it was a pastiche of “Akbar & Jeff’s Certificate Hut”...
[1] https://www.buypass.com/products/tls-ssl-certificates/read-m...
https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/blob/42bbd1b44af4...
https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/issues/4659
It was not. Don't use acme.sh.
Is there new information ? Was my impression wrong ?
3.D.3 covers the details about EV CS.
Without looking at it, are you sure about that?
I once used to know what REST meant. Are you doing REST as in HATEOAS or as in "we expose some http endpoints"?
ACME models everything as JSON objects, each of which is identified by URL. You can GET them, and they link to other objects with Location and Link headers.
To quote from the blog post:
> Dig around in the headers of the response, looking for one named "Location". Don't follow it like a redirection. Why would you ever follow a Location header in a HTTP header, right? Nope, that's your user account's identifier! Yes, you are a URL now.
I don't know if it's the pure ideal of HATEOS, but it's about as close as I've seen in use.
It has the classic failing though: it’s used by scripts which know exactly what they want to do (get a cert), so the clients still hardcode the actions they need. It just adds a layer of indirection as they need to keep track of URLs.
I would have preferred if it was just an RPC-over-HTTP/JSON with fixed endpoints and numeric object IDs.
I know it isn't a skill issue because of who the author is. So I can only imagine it is some sort of personal opinion that they dislike ACME as a concept or the tooling around ACME in general.
We've been using LE for a while (since 2019 I think) for handful of sites, and the best nonsense client _for us_ was https://github.com/do-know/Crypt-LE/releases.
Then this year we've done another piece of work this time against the Sectigo ACME server and le64 wasn't quite good enough.
So we ended up trying:-
- https://github.com/certbot/certbot on GitHub Actions, it was fine but didn't quite like the locked down environment
- https://github.com/go-acme/lego huge binary, cli was interestingly designed and the maintainer was quite rude when raising an issue
- https://github.com/rmbolger/Posh-ACME our favourite, but we ended up going with certbot on GHA once we fixed the weird issues around permissions
Edit* Re-read it. The tone isn't aimed at the ACME or the clients. It's the spec itself. ACME idea good, ACME implementation bad.
> ACME idea good, ACME implementation bad.
Maybe I'm misreading but it sounds like you're on a similar page to the author.
As they said at the top of the article:
> Many of the existing clients are also scary code, and I was not about to run any of them on my machines. They haven't earned the right to run with privileges for my private keys and/or ability to frob the web server (as root!) with their careless ways.
This might seem harsh but when I think it's a pretty fair perspective to have when running security-sensitive processes.
And a lot of the complaints ultimately boil down to not liking JWS. And I'm not really sure what she would have preferred there. ASN.1, which is even more complicated? Some bespoke format where implementations can't make use of existing libraries?
I would have had sympathy for the disdain for certbot, but certbot wasn't called out and that isn't what the blog post is about at all.
She doesn't "trust" tooling that basically the entire Internet including major security-conscious organizations are using, essentially letting perfect get in the way of good.
I think if she were a less capable engineer she would just set that shit up using the easiest way possible and forget about it like everyone else, and nothing bad would happen. Download nginx proxy manager, click click click, boom I have a wilcard cert, who cares?
I mean, this is her https site, which seems to just be a blog? What type of risk is she mitigating here?
Essentially the author is so skilled that she's letting perfect get in the way of good.
I haven't thought about certificates for years because it's not worth my time. I don't really care about the tooling, it's not my problem, and it's never caused a security issue. Put your shit behind a load balancer and you don't even need to run any ACME software on your own server.
Who do you think they hire to manage those LBs for you? People who never ran any ACME software, or people who have a blog post turning over every byte of JSON in the protocol in excruciating detail?
I’m not advocating for the use of cloud services necessarily, not saying we all need to allow someone else to abstract away everything. And I realize that someone on an ops team has to actually set that up at a low level at some point.
What I am saying is that there’s a lot of open source software that has already invented the wheel for you. You can run it easily and be reasonably assured that it’s safe enough to be exposed to the internet.
I gave the example of nginx proxy manager. It may be basic software but for a personal blog it’ll get the job done and you can set it up almost entirely in a GUI following a simple YouTube tutorial. It’ll get you an wildcard certificate automatically, and it’ll be secure enough.
To implement that many clients run as a root. Even if that root is in a docket container, this is needlessly elevated privileges especially given the complexity (again, needless) of many clients.
The sad part is that it is trivial to run most of the clients with an account with no privileges that can access very few files and use a unix socket to tell the web server to reload the certificate. But this is not done.
And then ideally at this point the web servers should if not implement then at least facilitate ACME protocol implementations, like, for example, redirect traffic requests from acme servers to another port with one-liner in config. But this is not the case.
For example the client needs a Certificate Signing Request, one way to achieve that is to either have the client choose the private keys or give it access to a chosen key, but the whole point of a CSR is that you don't need the private key, the CSR can be made by another system, including manually by a human and it can even be re-used repeatedly so that you don't need new ones until you decide to replace your keys.
Yes, if we look back at my hopes when Let's Encrypt launched we can be very disappointed that although this effort was a huge success almost all the server vendors continued to ship garbage designed for a long past era where HTTPS is a niche technology they barely support.
Or you could run Caddy which had a built in ACME client, but then you're running an extra daemon.
apache_mod_md eventually came along which works for me, but it's also got some lazy things (it mostly just manages requesting certs, you've got to have a frequent enough reload to pick them up; I guess that's ok because I don't think public Apache ever learned to periodically check if it needs to reopen access logs when they're rotated, so you probably reload Apache from time to time anyway)
Before that was workable, I did need some certs and used acme.sh by hand, and it was nicer than trusting a big thing running in a cron and restarting things, but it was also inconvenient becsause I had to remember to go do it.
It's fair to say that on day one the only launch client was Certbot, although on that day it wasn't called "Certbot" yet so if that's the name you remember it wasn't the only one. Given that it's not guaranteed this will be a success (like the American Revolution, or the Harry Potter books it seems obvious in hindsight but that's too late) it's understandable that they didn't spend lots of money developing a variety of clients and libraries you might want.
I run acme in a non privileged jail whose file system I can access from outside the jail.
So acme sees and accesses nothing and I can pluck results out with Unix primitives from the outside.
Yes, I use dns mode. Yes, my dns server is also a (different) jail.
Which I do understand. Although I use Docker, I mainly use it personally for things I don’t want to spend much time on. I don’t really like it over other alternatives, but it makes standing up a lab service stupidly easy.
Whether it's a local binary or a dockerised one, that access still needs to be marshalled either way & it can get complex facilitating that with a docker container. I haven't found it too bad but I'd really rather not need docker for on-demand automations.
I give plenty* of services root access to my system, most of which I haven't written myself & I certainly haven't audited their code line-by-line, but I agree with the author that you do get a sense from experience of the overall hygiene of a project & an ACME client has yet to give me good vibes.
* within reason
docker run --rm \
-v /srv/mywebsite/certs:/acme.sh/certs \
-v /srv/mywebsite/public/.well-known/acme-
challenge:/acme-challenge \
neilpang/acme.sh --issue \
--webroot /acme-challenge \
-d yourdomain.com \
--cert-file /acme.sh/certs/cert.pem \
--key-file /acme.sh/certs/key.pem \
--fullchain-file /acme.sh/certs/fullchain.pem
That example is not so bad - you've already pointed out the main obvious supply-chain attack vector in referencing a random ephemeral fork, but otherwise it's certonly (presumably neil's default) so it's the simplest case. Many clients have more... intrusive defaults that prioritise first-run cert onboarding which is opening more surface area for write error.
The older posts on the same website provided a bit more context for me to understand today's post better:
- "Why I still have an old-school cert on my https site" - January 3, 2023 - https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/01/03/ssl/
- "Another look at the steps for issuing a cert" - January 4, 2023 - https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/01/04/cert/
Sadly, security is a cat and mouse game, which means it's always evolving and you're forced to keep up - and it's inherent by the nature of the field, so we can't really blame anyone (unlike, say, being forced to integrate with the latest Google services to be allowed on the Play Store). At least you get to write your own ACME client if you want to. You don't have to use certbot, and there's no TPM-like behaviour locking you out of your own stuff.
It's not just about not understanding, it's that more complex stuff is inherently more prone to security vulnerabilities, however well you think you reviewed its code.
That's overly simplifying it and ignores the part where the simple stuff is not secure to begin with.
In the current context you could take a HTTP client with a formally verified TLS stack, would you really say it's inherently more vulnerable than a barebones HTTP client talking to a server over an unencrypted connection? I'd say there's a lot more exposed in that barebones client.
Browser vendors at some point claimed it confused users and removed the highlight (I think the same browser vendors who try to remove the "confusing" URL bar ...)
Aside from that EV certificates are slow to issue and phishers got similar enough EV certs making the whole thing moot.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/12/nope-...
https://web.archive.org/web/20191220215533/https://stripe.ia...
> this site uses an EV certificate for "Stripe, Inc", that was legitimately issued by Comodo. However, when you hear "Stripe, Inc", you are probably thinking of the payment processor incorporated in Delaware. Here, though, you are talking to the "Stripe, Inc" incorporated in Kentucky.
There's a lot of validation that's difficult to get around in DV (Domain Validation) and in DNS generally. Unless you go to every legal jurisdiction in the world and open businesses and file and have granted trademarks, you _cannot_ guarantee that no other person will have the same visible EV identity as you.
It's up to visitors to know that apple.com is where you buy Apple stuff, while apple.net, applecart.com, 4ppl3.com, аррlе.сом, ., example.com/https://apple.com are not. But if they can manage that, they can trust apple.com more than they could any URL with an "Apple, Inc." EV certificate. When browsers show the URL bar tend to highlight the top-level domain prominently, and they reject DNS names with mixed script, to avoid scammers fooling you. It's working better than EV.
In about 2005, the browser vendors and the Certificate Authorities began meeting to see if they could reach some agreement as neither had what they wanted and both might benefit from changes. This is the creation of the CA/Browser Forum aka CA/B Forum which still exists today.
From the dawn of SSL the CAs had been on a race to the bottom on quality and price.
Initially maybe somebody from a huge global audit firm that owns a CA turn up on a plane and talks to your VP of New Technology about this exciting new "World Wide Web" product, maybe somebody signs a $1M deal over ten years, and they issue a certificate for "Huge Corporation, Inc" with all the HQ address details, etc. and oh yeah, "www.hugecorp.example" should be on there because of that whole web thing, whatever that's about. Nerd stuff!
By 2005 your web designer clicks a web page owned by some bozo in a country you've never heard of, types in the company credit card details, company gets charged $15 because it's "on sale" for a 3 year cert for www.mycompany.example and mail.mycompany.com is thrown in for free, so that's nice. Is it secure? Maybe? I dunno, I think it checked my email address? Whatever. The "real world address" field in this certificate now says "Not verified / Not verified / None" which is weird, but maybe that's normal?
The CAs can see that if this keeps up in another decade they'll be charging $1 each for 10 year certificates, they need a better product and the browser vendors can make that happen.
On the other hand the browser vendors have noticed that whereas auditors arriving by aeroplane was a bit much, "Our software checked their email address matched in the From line" is kinda crap as an "assurance" of "identity".
So, the CA/B Baseline Requirements aka BRs are one result. Every CA agreed they'd do at least what the "baseline" required and in practice that's basically all they do because it'd cost extra to do more so why bother. The BRs started out pretty modest - but it's amazing what you find people were doing when you begin writing down the basics of what obviously they shouldn't do.
For example, how about "No issuing certificates for names which don't exist" ? Sounds easy enough right? When "something.example" first comes into existence there shouldn't already be certificates for "something.example" because it didn't exist... right? Oops, lots of CAs had been issuing those certificates, reasoning that it's probably fine and hey, free money.
Gradually the BRs got stricter, improving the quality of this baseline product in both terms of the technology and the business processes, this has been an enormous boon, because it's an agreement for the industry this ratchets things for everybody, so there's no race to the bottom on quality because your competitors aren't allowed to do worse than the baseline. On price, the same can't be said, zero cost certificates are what Let's Encrypt is most famous for after all.
The other side of the deal is what the CAs wanted, they wanted UI for their new premium product. That's EV. Unlike many of the baseline requirements, this is very product focused (although to avoid being an illegal cartel it is forbidden for CA/B Forum to discuss products, pricing etc.) and so it doesn't make much technical sense.
The EV documents basically say you get all of the Baseline, plus we're going to check the name of your business - here's how we'll check - and then the web browser is going to display that name. It's implied that these extra checks cost more money (they do, and so this product is much more expensive). So improvements to that baseline do help still, but they also help everybody who didn't buy the premium EV product.
Now, why doesn't this work in practice? The DNS name or IP address in an "ordinary" certificate can be compared to reality automatically by the web browser. This site says it is news.ycombinator.com, it has a certificate for news.ycombinator.com, that's the same OK. Your browser performs this check, automatically and seamlessly, for every single HTTP transaction. Here on HN that's per page load, but on many sites you're doing transactions as you click UI or scroll the page, each is checked.
With EV the checks must be done by a human, is this site really "Bob's Burgers" ? Actually wait, is it really "Bob's Burgers of Ohio, US" ? Worse, probably although you know them as Bob's Burgers, legally, as you'd see on their papers of incorporation they are "Smith Restaurant Holdings Inc." and they're registered in Delaware because of course they are.
So now you're staring at the formal company name of a busines and trying to guess whether that's legitimate or a scam. But remember you can't just do this check once, scammers might find a way to redirect some traffic and so you need to check every individual transaction like your web browser does. Of course it's a tireless machine and you are not.
So in practice this isn't effective.
Imagine explaining to my mother how to properly check this, then imagine explaining why the check she just made is wrong now because the bank changed how their login procedure works.
We could have attempted something with better security, although nowhere close to fool proof, but the CAs were focused on a profitable product not on improving security, and I do not expect anyone to have another bite of that cherry.
As to the incentive to register, this is a cart v horse problem. Most businesses do not begin with a single unwavering vision of their eventual product and branding, they iterate, and that means the famous branding will need an expensive corporate change just to make the EV line up properly, that's just not going to happen much of the time, so people get used to seeing the "wrong" name and once that happens this is worthless.
Meanwhile crooks can spend a few bucks to register a similar-sounding name and registration authorities don't care, while the machine sees at a glance the differences between bobs-burgers.example and robs-burgers.example and bobsburgers.example, the analogous business registrations look similar enough that humans would click right past.
The big problem with PKI is that there are known bad (or at least sketchy) actors on the big CA lists that realistically can't be taken off that list.
CAA makes sure only one CA signs the cert for the real domain. FIDO2 prevents phising on a similar-looking domain. EV would force a phisher to get a similar-looking corporate name, but it's beside the main FIDO2 protection.
We're in an era where browsers have forced certificate transparency and removed major vendor CAs when they've issued certificates in violation of the browsers' requirements.
The concern about bad/sketchy CAs in the list feels dated.
There are a number of shell-based ACME clients whose prerequisites are: OpenSSL and cURL. You're probably already relying on OpenSSL and cURL for a bunch of things already.
If you can read shell code you can step through the logic and understand what they're doing. Some of them (e.g., acme.sh) often run as a service user (e.g., default install from FreeBSD ports) so the code runs unprivileged: just add a sudo (or doas) config to allow it to restart Apache/nginx.
This is really important to understand if you care about either: Actually engineering security at some scale or knowing what's actually going on in order to model it properly in your head.
If you just want to make a web site so you can put up a blog about your new kitten, any of the tools is fine, you don't care, click click click, done.
For somebody like Rachel or many HN readers, knowing enough of the technology to understand that the ACME client needn't run on your web servers is crucial. It also means you know that when some particular client you're evaluating needs to run on the web server that it's a limitation of that client not of the protocol - birds can't all fly, but flying is totally one of the options for birds, we should try an eagle not an emu if we want flying.
Honest question:
* Do you understand OS syscalls in detail?
* Do you understand how your BIOS initializes your hardware?
* Do you understand how modern filesystems work?
* Do you understand the finer details of HTTP or TCP?
Because... I don't. But I know enough about them that I'm quite convinced each of them is a lot more difficult to understand than ACME. And all of them and a lot more stuff are required if you want to run a web server.
Each extra bit of software is an additional attack surface after all
If you're a fan of left-pad I won't judge but don't expect me to partake without bitter complaints.
I also wrote up a digested description of the issuance flow here: https://www.arnavion.dev/blog/2019-06-01-how-does-acme-v2-wo... It's not a replacement for reading the RFCs, but it presents the information in the sequence that you would follow for issuance, so think of it like an index to the RFC sections.
(6.858 is the old name of the class, it was renamed to 6.5660 recently.)
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
I know ACME alone is not insurmountably complex, but it is another brick in the wall.
Perhaps the author wasn't looking hard enough. It could probably be ported with little effort.
This client really wants the easy case where the client lives on the machine which owns the name and is running the web server, and then it uses OpenBSD-specific partitioning so that elements of the client can't easily taint one another if they're defective
But, the ACME protocol would allow actual air gapping - the protocol doesn't care whether the machine which needs a certificate, the machine running an ACME client, and the machine controlling the name are three separate machines, that's fine, which means if we do not use this OpenBSD all-in-one client we can have a web server which literally doesn't do ACME at all, an ACME client machine which has no permission to serve web pages or anything like that, and name servers which also know nothing about ACME and yet the whole system works.
That's more effort than "I just install OpenBSD" but it's how this was designed to deliver security rather than putting all our trust in OpenBSD to be bug-free.
Most software in the OpenBSD base system lacks features on purpose. Their dev team frequently rejects patches and feature requests without compelling reasons to exist. Less features means less places for things to go wrong means less chance of security bugs.
It exists so their simple webserver (also in the base system) has ACME support working out of the box. No third party software to install, no bullshit to configure, everything just works as part of a super compact OS. Which to this day still fits on a single CD-ROM.
Most of all no stupid Rust compiler needed so it works on i386 (Rust cannot self-host on i386 because it's so bloated it runs out of memory, which is why Rust tools are not included in i386).
If your needs exceed this or you adore complexity then feel free to look elsewhere.
Man page: https://man.openbsd.org/man1/acme-client.1
Source: https://github.com/openbsd/src/tree/master/usr.sbin/acme-cli...
Kind of makes me wonder what kind of stack her website is running on that something like a lightweight ACME library (https://github.com/jmccl/acme-lw comes to mind, but there's a C++ library for ESP32s that should be even more lightweight) loading in the certificates isn't doing the job.
The problem is, SSL is a fucking hot, ossified mess. Many of the noted core issues, especially the weirdnesses around encoding and bitfields, are due to historical baggage of ASN.1/X.509. It's not fun to deal with it, at all... the math alone is bad enough, but the old abstractions to store all the various things for the math are simply constrained by the technological capabilities of the late '80s.
There would have been a chance to at least partially reduce the mess with the introduction of LetsEncrypt - basically, have the protocol transmit all of the required math values in a decent form and get an x.509 cert back - and HTTP/2, but that wasn't done because it would have required redeveloping a bunch of stuff from scratch whereas one can build an ACME CA with, essentially, a few lines of shell script, OpenSSL and six crates of high proof alcohol to drink away one's frustrations of dealing with OpenSSL, and integrate this with all software and libraries that exist there.
ASN.1 and X509 aren't all that bad. It's a comprehensively documented binary format that's efficient and used everywhere, even if it's hidden away in binary protocols you don't look at every day.
Unlike what most people seem to think, ACME isn't something invented just for Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt was certainly the first high-profile CA to implement the protocol, but various CAs (free and paid) have their own ACME servers and have had them for ages now. It's a generic protocol for certificate authorities to securely do domain validation and certificate provisioning that Let's Encrypt implemented first.
The unnecessarily complex parts of the protocol when writing a from-the-ground-up client are complex because ACME didn't reinvent the wheel, and reused existing standard protocols instead. Unfortunately, that means having to deal with JWS, but on the other hand, it means most people don't need to write their own ACME-JWS-replacement-protocol parsers. All the other parts are complex because the problem ACME is solving is actually quite complex.
The author wrote [another post](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/01/03/ssl/) about the time they fell for the lies of a CA that promised an "easier" solution. That solution is pretty much ACME, but with more manual steps (like registering an account, entering domain names).
I personally think that for this (and for many other protocols, to be honest) XML would've been a better fit as its parsers are more resilient against weird data, but these days talking about XML will make people look at you like you're proposing COBOL. Hell, I even exchanging raw, binary ASN.1 messages would probably have gone over pretty well, as you need ASN.1 to generate the CSR and request the certificate anyway. But, people chose "modern" JSON instead, so now we're base64 encoding values that JSON parsers will inevitably fuck up instead.
This depends on whether you're speaking as a matter of history. ACME was originally invented and implemented by the Let's Encrypt team, but in the hope that it could become an open standard that would be used by other CAs. That hope was eventually borne out.
An argument for this is that it makes it theoretically possible for devices that have no knowledge of anything about PKI since the year 2000, and/or no additional programmability, to use Let's Encrypt certs (obtained on their behalf by an external client application). I have, in fact, subsequently gotten something like that to work as a consultant.
As for oooold devices - doesn't LetsEncrypt demand key lengths and hash algorithms nowadays that simply weren't implemented back then?
This is bad advice - making a 4096 bit key slows down visitors of your website and only gives you 2048 bits of security (if someone can break a 2048 bit RSA key they'll break the LetsEncrypt intermediate cert and can MITM your site). You should use a 2048 bit leaf certificate here
If the server was using a key exchange that did not support forward secrecy then yes. But:
% echo | openssl s_client -connect rachelbythebay.com:443 2>/dev/null | grep Cipher
New, TLSv1.2, Cipher is ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
Cipher : ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
If on the other hand you use a FS key exchange (like ECDHE), and the session is recorded, and the server's private key is obtained, the session key cannot be recovered (that's a property of ECDHE or any forward-secure key exchange), and none of the traffic is decryptable.
Of course it can, but only for that specific session.
You would need to compromise the _ephemeral session key_ which is difficult because it is discarded by both parties when the session is closed.
Compromising the RSA key backing the certificate allows _future_ impersonations of the server, which is a different attack altogether.
Basically forward secrecy is where both the sender and receiver throw away the key after the data is decrypted. That way the key is not available for an attacker to get access to later. If the attacker can find some way other than access to the key to decrypt the data then forward secrecy has no benefit.
My favourite client is probably https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh
If you use a DNS service provider that supports it, you can use the DNS-01 challenge to get a certificate - that means that you can have the acme.sh running on a completely different server which should help if you're twitchy about running a complex script on it. It's also got the advantage of allowing you to get certificates for internal/non-routable addresses.
Personally, I find that tls-alpn-01 is even nicer than dns-01. You can run a web server (or reverse proxy) that listens to port 443, and nothing else, and have it automatically obtain and renew TLS certificates, with the challenges being sent via TLS ALPN over the same port you're already listening on. Several web servers and reverse proxies have support for it built in, so you just configure your domain name and the email address you want to use for your Let's Encrypt account, and you get working TLS.
I assume certbot is the client she’s alluding to that misinterprets one of the factors in the protocol as hex vs decimal and somehow things still work, which is incredibly worrisome.
Then I discovered the web-root approach people mention here and it made a huge difference. Now I have the HTTP snippet in my server set to serve up ACME challenges from a static directory and push everything else to HTTPS, and the ACME client just needs write permission to that directory. I can dynamically include that snippet in all of the sites my server handles and be done.
If I really felt like it, I could even write a wrapper function so the ACME client doesn’t even need restart permissions on the web-server (for me, probably too much to bother with, but for someone like Rachel perhaps worthwhile).
letsencrypt renew --non-interactive --post-hook "systemctl reload nginx"I run it in "webroot" mode on NgINX servers so it's just a matter of including the relevant config file in your HTTP sections (likely before redirecting to HTTPS) so that "/.well-known/acme-challenge/" works correctly. Then when you do run certbot, it can put the challenge file into the webroot and NgINX will automatically serve it. This allows certbot to do its thing without needing to do anything with NgINX.
Pinned to an old version and looking for a replacement right now.
If anyone else ran into that it's just a matter of adding
--server letsencryptI rather liked using ZeroSSL for a long time (perhaps just out of knee-jerk resistance to the “Just drink the Koolaid^W^W^Wuse Let’s Encrypt! C’mon man, everyone’s doing it!” nature of LE usage), but of late ZeroSSL has gotten so unreliable that I’ve rolled my eyes and started swapping things back to LE.
Personally I like https://github.com/dehydrated-io/dehydrated. Same concept as acme.sh but only 2500 lines of shell and 54 open issues. You do have to roll your own hook script though.
Curiously, first commits for both acme.sh and dehydrated were in December 2015. Maybe they both took a security class at uni that fall.
But yeah, can definitely recommend DNS-01 over HTTP-01, since it doesn't involve implicitly messing with your server settings, and makes it much easier to have a single locked server with all the ACME secrets, and then distribute the certs to the open-to-the-internet web servers.
+1 for acme.sh, it's beautiful.
tiny-acme.py is 200 lines, easy to audit and incorporate parts into your own infrastructure. It works well for the tiny work it does but it does support anything more modern.
For instance, Whatsapp can not open HTTP links anymore.
The problem is that mere existence of HTTP is a vulnerability. Users following any insecure link to anywhere allow MITM attackers to inject any content, and redirect to any URL.
These can be targeted attacks against vulnerabilities in the browser. These can be turning browsers into a botnet like the Great Cannon. These can be redirects, popunders, or other sneaky tab manipulation for opening phishing pages for other domains (unrelated to yours) that do have important content.
Your server probably won't even be contacted during such attack. Insecure URLs to your site are the vulnerability. Don't spread URLs that disable network-level security.
TLS isn't for you, it's for your readers.
Maybe the answer is disabling the JS runtime on non-TLS sites, maybe that has the added benefit of making the web (documents and “posters”) light again.
SMS is unencrypted, phone calls are unencrypted- yet we don’t worry nearly as much about people injecting content or modifying things. Because we trust out providers, largely, but the capability 100% exists for that; with no actual recourse. With browsing the internet we do have recourse- optionally use a VPN.
All of this security theatre is just moving the trust around, I would much rather make laws that protect the integrity of traffic sent via ISPs than add to the computational waste from military grade encrypting the local menu for the pizza shop.
Worse still, the pizza shop won’t go through the effort so they either won’t bother having a website or will put it on facebook or some other crazy centralised platform.
I’ll tell you something, I trust my ISP (Bahnhof- famous for protecting thepiratebay) a lot more than I trust Facebook not to do weird moderation activities.
Except when an adversary MITMs your site and injects an attack to one of your readers:
* https://www.infoworld.com/article/2188091/uk-spy-agency-uses...
Further: tapping glass is a thing, and if the only traffic that is encrypted is the "important" or "sensitive" stuff, then it sticks out in the flow, and so attackers know to focus just on that. If all traffic is encrypted, then it's much harder for attackers to figure out what is important and what is not.
So by encrypting your "unimportant" data you add more noise that has to be sifted through.
What someone chooses to read on a blog is no one else's business, and can be very sensitive.
Visitors to your website may encounter it. Do you not care that your visitors may be seeing ads?
You're also leaking what your visitors are reading to their ISPs and governments. Maybe you don't consider anything you write about to be remotely sensitive, but how critically do you examine that with every new piece you write?
If you wrote something which could be sensitive to readers in some parts of the world (something about circumventing censorship, something critical of some religion, something involving abortion or other forms of healthcare that some governments are cracking down on), do you then add SSL at that point? Or do you refrain from publishing it?
Personally, I like the freedom to just not think about these things. I can write about whatever I want, however controversial it might be in some regions, no matter how dangerous it is for some people to be found reading about it, and be confident that my readers can expect at least a baseline of safety because my blog, like pretty much every other in the world today, uses cryptography to ensure that governments and ISPs can't use deep packet inspection to scan the words they read or use MITM to inject things into my blog. Does it really matter? Well probably not for my site specifically, but across all the blogs and websites in the world and all the visitors in the world, that's a whole lot of "probably not"s which all combine together into a huge "almost definitely".
So while it's not perfect, it's pretty good, and a very low investment for me as a website owner :)
I see no other reason to serve content over HTTPS.
The reason you don't see many MITM boxes injecting content into HTTP anymore is because of widespread HTTPS adoption and browsers taking steps to distrust HTTP, making MITM injection a near-useless tactic.
(This rhymes with the observation that some people now perceive Y2K as overhyped fear-mongering that amounted to nothing, without understanding that immense work happened behind the scenes to avert problems.)
And can generally be configured by the user not to downgrade to http without an explicit prompt.
Honestly I disagree with the refusal to support various APIs over http. Making the (configurable last I checked) prompt mandatory per browser session would have sufficed to push all mainstream sites to strictly https.
Absolutely, and this works quite well on the current web.
> Honestly I disagree with the refusal to support various APIs over http.
There are multiple good reasons to do so. Part of it is pushing people to HTTPS; part of it is the observation that if you allow an API over HTTP, you're allowing that API to any attacker.
In the scenario I described you're doing that only after the user has explicitly opted in on a case by case basis, and you're forcing a per-session nag on them in order to coerce mainstream website operators to adopt the secure default.
At that point it's functionally slightly more obtuse than adding an exception for a certificate (because those are persistent). Rejecting the latter on the basis of security is adopting a position that no amount of user discretion is acceptable. At least personally I'm comfortable disagreeing with that.
More generally, I support secure defaults but almost invariably disagree with disallowing users to shoot themselves in the foot. As an example, I expect a stern warning if I attempt to uninstall my kernel but I also expect the software on my device to do exactly what I tell it to 100% of the time regardless of what the developers might have thought was best for me.
I agree with this. But also, there is a strong degree to which users will go track down ways (or follow random instructions) to shoot themselves in the foot if some site they care about says "do this so we can function!". I do think, in cases where there's value in collectively pushing for better defaults, it's sometimes OK for the "I can always make my device do exactly what I tell it to do" escape hatch to be "download the source and change it yourself". Not every escape hatch gets a setting, because not every escape hatch is supported.
In theory I agree. In practice building a modern browser is neither easy nor is it feasible to do so on an average computer.
Given that a nag message would suffice to coerce all mainstream operators (thus accomplishing the goals I've seen stated) I'm left unconvinced. That said, I'm not particularly bothered since the trivial workaround is a self signed certificate and the user adding an exception. It's admittedly a case of principle rather than practice.
If I'm really curious about your plain http site I'll check it out through archive.org, and I'm definitely not going to keep visiting it frequently.
It's been easy to live with forced https for at least five years (and for at least the last ten with https first, with confirmations for plain http).
It's a restaurant that's been here with the same menu since the 1970s, and their website does absolutely nothing besides pass out information (phone number, menu, directions), so they probably put it up in 2002 and haven't changed it since. It was just a startling reminder of how ubiquitous HTTPS has gotten.
This was my experience sending a link to someone who primarily uses an iPad and is non-technical. They were not going to find/open their Macbook to see the link.
Meanwhile, ECDSA is so complex to write that most people will get it wrong and end up with a security hole that makes the NSA happy.
There are private keys and hash functions involved. But base64url and json aren't the worst web crimes to have been inflicted upon us. It's not _that_ bad, is it?
But "the rest" of ACME also include X.509 certificates and PKCS#10 Certificate Signing Requests, which are in turn based on ASN.1 (you're fortunate enough you only need DER encoding) and RSA parameters. ASN.1 and X.509 are devilishly complex if you don't let openssl do everything for you and even if you do. The first few paragraphs are all about making the correct CSR and dealing with RSA, and encoding bigints the right way (which is slightly different between DER and JWK to make things more fun).
Besides that I don't know much about the ACME spec, but the post mentions a couple of other things :
So far, we have (at least): RSA keys, SHA256 digests, RSA signing, base64 but not really base64, string concatenation, JSON inside JSON, Location headers used as identities instead of a target with a 301 response, HEAD requests to get a single value buried as a header, making one request (nonce) to make ANY OTHER request, and there's more to come.
This does sound quite complex. I'm just not sure how much simpler ACME could be. Overturning the clusterfuck that is ASN.1, X.509 and the various PKCS#* standards has been a lost cause for decades now. JOSE is something I would rather do without, but if you're writing an IETF RFC, you're only other option is CMS[1], which is even worse. You can try to offer a new signature format, but that would be shut down for being "simpler and cleaner than JOSE, but JOSE just has some warts that need to be fixed or avoided"[2].
I think the things you're left with that could have been simplified and accepted as a standard are the APIs themselves, like getting a nonce with a HEAD request and storing identifiers in a Location header. Perhaps you could have removed signatures (and then JOSE) completely and rely on client IDs and secrets since we're already running over TLS, but I'm not familiar enough with the protocol to know what would be the impact. If you really didn't need any PKI for the protocol itself here, then this is a magnificent edifice of overengineering indeed.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5652 [2] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/cfrg/4YQH6Yj3c92VUxqo-...
Most of it is unused though, only CN, SANs and public key are used.
Issuer: We need to know who issued this cert, then we can check whether we trust them and whether the signature on the certificate is indeed from them, and potentially repeat this process - this cert was issued by Let's Encrypt's E5 intermediate
Validity: We need to know when this cert was or will be valid, a perfectly good certificate for 2019 ain't much good now, this one is valid from early May until early August
Now we get a public key, in this case a nice modern elliptic curve P-256 key
We need to know how the signature works, in this case it's ECDSA with SHA-384
And we need a serial number for the certificate, this unique number helps sidestep some nasty problems and also gives us an easy shorthand if reporting problems, 05:6B:9D:B0:A1:AE:BB:6D:CA:0B:1A:F0:61:FF:B5:68:4F:5A will never be any other cert only this one.
We get a mandatory notice that this particular certificate is NOT a CA certificate, it's just for a web server, and we get the "Extended key use" which says it's for either servers or for clients (Let's Encrypt intends to cease offering "for client" certificates in the next year or so, today they're the default)
Then we get a URL for the CRL where you can find out if this certificate (or others like it) were revoked since issuance, info with a URL for OCSP (also going away soon) and a URL where you can get your own copy of the issuer's certificate if you somehow do not have that.
We get a policy OID, this is effectively a complicated way to say "If you check Let's Encrypt's formal policy documents, this certificate was specifically issued under the policy identified with this OID", these do change but not often.
Finally we get two embedded SCTs, these are proof that two named Certificate Transparency Log services have seen this certificate, or rather, the raw data in the certificate, although they might also have the actual certificate.
So, quite a lot more than you listed.
[A correct decoder also needs to actually verify the signature, I did not list that part, obviously ignoring the signature would be a bad idea for a live system as then anybody can lie about anything]
Is this finally the case now? About 5 years back IIS would fail to load a certificate without a CN, despite the field being deprecated since 2000.
And who would run IIS? A bunch of janky/dodgy/shady marketing affiliates, at least. Quite common in the gambling industry.
The spec (well, the RFC anyway) is indeed classically RFC-ish, but the same applies to HTTP or TCP/IP, and I haven't seen the same sort of complaints about those. Maybe it's just resistance to change? Most of the specs (JOSE, ACME etc) aren't really complex for the sake of complexity, but solve problems that aren't simple problems to solve simply in a simple fashion. I don't think that's bad at all, it's mostly indicative of the complexity of the problem we're solving.
Some examples of gratuitous complexity:
1. Supporting too many goddamn algorithms. Keeping RSA and HMAC-SHA256 for leagcy-compatible stuff, and Ed25519 for XChaChaPoly1305 for regular use would have been better. Instead we support both RSA with PKCS#1 v1.5 signatures and RSA-PSS with MGF1, as well as ECDH with every possible curve in theory (in practice only 3 NIST Prime curves).
2. Plethora of ways to combine JWE and JWS. You can encrypt-then-sign or sign-then-encrypt. You can even create multiple layers of nesting.
3. Different "typ"s in the header.
4. RSA JWKs can specify the d, p, q, dq, dp and qi values of the RSA private key, even though everything can be derived from "p" and "q" (and the public modulus and exponent "n" and "e").
5. JWE supports almost every combination of key encryption algorithm, content encryption algorithm and compression algorithm. To make things interesting, almost all of the options are insecure to a certain degree, but if you're not an expert you wouldn't know that.
6. Oh, and JWE supports password-based key derivation for encryption.
7. On the other, JWS is smarter. It doesn't need this fancy shmancy password-based key derivation thingamajig! Instead, you can just use HMAC-SHA256 with any key length you want. So if you fancy encrypting your tokens with a cool password like "secret007" and feel like you're a cool guy with sunglasses in a 1990s movie, just go ahead!
This is just some of the things of the top of my head. JOSE is bonkers. It's a monument to misguided overengineering. But the saddest thing about JOSE is that it's still much simpler than the standards which predated it: PKCS#7/CMS, S/MIME and the worst of all - XMLDSig.
Take your argument about order of operations or algorithms. Just because you might not need to do it in an alternate order or use a legacy (and broken) algorithm doesn't mean nobody else does. Keep in mind that this standard isn't exactly new, and isn't only used in startups in San Francisco. There are tons of systems that use it that might only get updated a handful of times each year. Or long-lived JWTs that need to be supported for 5 years. Not going to replace hardware that is out on a pole somewhere just because someone thought the RFC was too complicated.
Out of your arguments, none of them require you to do it that way. Example: you don't have to supply d, dq, dp or qi if you don't want to. But if you communicate with some embedded device that will run out of solar power before it can derive them from the RSA primitives, you will definitely help it by just supplying it on the big beefy hardware that doesn't have that problem. It allows you to move energy and compute cost wherever it works best for the use case.
Even simpler: if you use a library where you can specify a RSA Key and a static ID, you don't have to think about any of this; it will do all of it for you and you wouldn't even know about the RFC anyway.
The only reason someone would need to know the details is if you don't use a library or if you are the one writing it.
We haven't even scratched the surface of creating an order, dealing with authorizations and challenges, the whole "key thumbprint" thing, what actually goes into those TXT records, and all of that other fun stuff."
Yikes. It's almost unbelievable. What a colossal tangle of complexity. Thank you for sharing the fruits of your labors. Great writing style and content.
The steps described in the article sound familiar to the process done in the early 2000's, but I'm not sure why you'd want to make it hard for yourself now.
I use certbot with "--preferred-challenges dns-01" and "--manual-auth-hook" / "--manual-cleanup-hook" to dynamically create DNS records, rather than needing to modify the webserver config (and the security/access risks that comes with). It just needs putting the cert/key in the right place and reloading the webserver/loadbalancer.
What registrar do people recommend in 2025?
I have built a registrar in the past and have a lot of arcane knowledge about how they work. Just need to figure out a way to monetize!
Don’t look to large, well-known registrars. I would suggest that you look for local registrars in your area. The TLD registry for your country/area usually has a list of the authorized registrars, so you can simply search that for entities with a local address.
Disclaimer: I work at such a small registrar, but you are probably not in our target market.
I forget how they handled key expiration/revocation...
What you want from a registrar is to keep existing for many years and resilience to social engineering, and AWS seems like the next best thing to Google which you famously can't even talk to for a social engineering attempt. I expect AWS account management to be almost as good as Gaia, but don't really know how hard social engineering is.
Must be other good ones? Somewhat prefer something in the UK (but have been using Gandi so its not essential).
INWX in Germany also seems well regarded but I haven't used them.
It looks silly for a small value like 65537, but the protocol also needs to handle numbers that are thousands of bits long. It makes sense to consistently use the same format for all numbers instead of special-casing small values.
Subject Alternative Name (SAN) is not an alternative in the sense that it's an alias, SANs exist because the X.509 certificate standard is, as its name might suggest, intended for the X.500 directory system, a system from the 20th century which was never actually deployed. Mozilla (back then the Netscape Corporation) didn't like re-inventing wheels and this standard for certificates already existed so they used it in their new "Secure Sockets" technology but it has no Internet names so at first they just put names in plain text. However, X.500 was intended to be infinitely extensible, so we can just invent an alternative naming scheme, and that's what the SANs are, which is why they're mandatory for certificates in the Web PKI today - these are the Internet's names for things, so they're mandatory when talking about the Internet, they're described in detail in PKIX, the IETF document standardising the use of X.500 for the Internet.
There are several types of name we can express as SANs but in a certificate the two you'll commonly see are dnsName - the same ASCII names you'd see in URLs like "news.ycombinator.com" or "www.google.com" and ipAddress - a 32-bit integer typically spelled as four dotted decimals 10.20.30.40 [yes or an IPv6 128-bit integer will work here, don't worry]
Because the SANs aren't just free text a machine can reliably parse them which would doubtless meet Rachel's approval. The browser can mindlessly compare the bytes in the certificate "news.ycombinator.com" with the bytes in the actual DNS name it looked up "news.ycombinator.com" and those match so this cert is for this site.
With free text in a CN field like a 1990s SSL certificate (or, sadly, many certificates well into the 2010s because it was difficult to get issuers to comply properly with the rules and stop spewing nonsense into CN) it's entirely possible to see a certificate for " 10.200.300.400" which well, what's that for? Is that leading space significant? Is that an IP address? But those numbers don't even fit in one byte each I hope our parser copes!
You can’t mindlessly compare the bytes of the host name: you have to know that it’s the presentation format of the name, not the DNS wire format; you have to deal with ASCII case insensitivity; you have to guess what to do about trailing dots (because that isn’t specified); you have to deal with wildcards (being careful to note that PKIX wildcard matching is different from DNS wildcard matching).
It’s not as easy as it should be!
The names PKIX writes into dnsName are exactly the same as the hostnames in DNS. They are defined to always be Fully Qualified, and yet not to have a trailing dot, you don't have to like that but it's specified and it's exactly how the web browsers worked already 25+ years ago.
You're correct that they're not the on-wire label-by-label DNS structure, but they are the canonical human readable DNS name, specifically the Punycode encoded name, so [the website] https://xn--j1ay.xn--p1ai/ the Russian registry which most browsers will display with Cyrllic, has its names stored in certificates the same way as it is handled in DNS, as Punycode "xn--j1ay.xn--p1ai". In software I've seen the label-by-label encoding stuff tends to live deep inside DNS-specific code, but the DNS name needed for comparing with a certificate does not do this.
You don't need to "deal with" case except in the sense that you ignore it, DNS doesn't handle case, the dnsName in SANs explicitly doesn't carry this, so just ignore the case bits. Your DNS client will do the case bit wiggling entropy hack, but that's not in code the certificate checking will care about.
You do need to care about wildcards, but we eliminated the last very weird certificate wildcards because they were minted only by a single CA (which argued by their reading they were obeying PKIX) and that CA is no longer in business 'cos it turns out some of the stupid things they were doing even a creative lawyerly reading of specifications couldn't justify. So the only use actually enabled today is replacing one DNS label at the front of the name. Nothing else is used, no suffixes, no mid-label stuff, no multi-label wildcards, no labels other than the first.
Edited to better explain the IDN situation hopefully
The DNS is case-insensitive, though only for ASCII. So you have to compare names case-insensitively (again, for ASCII). It _is_ possible to have DNS servers return non-lowercase names! E.g., way back when sun.com's DNS servers would return Sun.COM if I remember correctly. So you do have to be careful about this, though if you do a case-sensitive, memcmp()-like comparison, 999 times out of 1,000 everything will work, and you won't fail open when it doesn't.
At first: The only anti-spoof defence provided in DNS is an ID number, initially people are like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... and so the attacker watches you use these IDs then makes you ask a question, "6: A? mybank.example" and simultaneously they answer "6: A 10.20.30.40" before your real DNS server could likely respond - choosing their own IP address. Six is the expected ID, you just got spoofed and will visit their fake bank.
So then: DNS clients get smarter using randomisation for the ID, 23493, 45390, 18301... this helps considerably, but bandwidth is cheap and those IDs are only 16-bit so a bad guy can actually send you 65536 answers and get a 100% success rate with spoofing, or more realistically maybe they send 1000 answers and still have more than 1% success.
Today as a further improvement, we use Paul Vixie's bit 0x20 hack which uses every letter of a DNS label to hide one bit of entropy in the case in addition to the random ID. Now the attacker has to try not only different IDs but different case spellings, A? mYbANk.eXAmpLE or maybe A? MyBANk.EXAMple or A? mybaNK.EXamPLE -- only responses with the right case match, the others are ignored.
So, because of all this security shenanigans, your DNS client knows that case in DNS queries doesn't matter and will do what we want for this purpose.
[Edited: fixed a few typos]
Yes, all the popular browsers require this.
> they certainly didn't even as of ~10 years ago?
That's true, ten years ago it was likely that if a browser required this they would see unacceptably high failure rates because CAs were non-compliant and enforcement wasn't good enough. Issuing certs which would fail PKIX was prohibited, but so is speeding and yet people do that every day. CT improved our ability to inspect what was being issued and monitor fixes.
> Yes, it is "required", but CN only has worked for quite some time.
No trusted CA will issue "CN only" for many years now, if you could obtain such a certificate you'd find it won't work in any popular browser either. You can read the Chromium or Mozilla source and there just isn't any code to look in CN, the browser just parses the SANs.
> I find this tricks up some IT admins who are still used to only supplying a CN and don't know what a SAN is.
In most cases this is a sign you're using something crap like openssl's command line to make CSRs, and so you're probably expending a lot of effort filling out values which will be ignored by the CA and yet not offered parameters you did need.
As you noted about OpenSSL, Windows CertSvr will allow you to do CN only, too.
Chromium published an "intent to remove" and then actually removed the CN parsing in 2017, at that point EnableCommonNameFallbackForLocalAnchors was available for people who were still catching up to policy from ~15 years ago. The policy override flag was removed in 2018, after people had long enough to fix their shit.
Mozilla had already made an equivalent change before that, maybe it worked for a few more years in Safari? I don't have a Mac so no idea.
X.500 really was deployed – never at the scale the designers originally intended, as a single global directory system – but, as an enterprise directory system, yes it was – and it still survives in that role today, albeit as a legacy niche.
LDAP is a direct descendant of X.500 – it was basically taking the X.500 Directory Access Protocol (DAP, X.511), simplifying it somewhat, and porting it to run on top of TCP instead of OSI TP. Many early LDAP servers were just X.500 DAP servers with LDAP support added as an additional feature–and if you read the LDAP RFCs, large parts of them were written with that assumption, and don't make much sense unless you understanding the X.500 underpinnings
Nowadays, the most popular LDAP servers never implemented X.500, and few bother to implement the full set of X.500 semantics which LDAP supports – although one of the infuriating things about LDAP is that every implementation is a slightly different subset of the X.500 feature set.
X.400 survives in some applications–it is the basis of the NATO standard Military Message Handling System (MMHS) and also the Aeronautical Message Handling System (AMHS) used by commercial aircraft – and X.400 and X.500 were designed to be used together. I know vendors like Thales Group still sell X.500 directory servers for use with AMHS (and probably MMHS too)
Isode still sells M-Vault which supports both LDAP and X.500 DAP (X.511) – primarily for military applications
I was thinking about the global directory rather than individual local X.500 instances but I didn't say that explicitly and I should have.
It's on my long list of potential side projects, but I don't think I'll ever gey around to it
You just need bash, no weird dependency, not that much complicated. Easy to manipulate.
Why I still have an old-school cert on my HTTPS site - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34242028 - Jan 2023 (63 comments)
I've been thinking of using a Blockchain to register domain name-to-IP-address mappings in a cryptographically secure way and then writing a Chrome extension which connects to the Blockchain (to any known peer IP; it would start from a few hardcoded seed node IPs and discover more peers as is standard for most Blockchains and P2P protocols; or you could host your own blockchain node locally and use it as your personal DNS service) and then the extension can do DNS lookups on-chain. The Chrome extension could act as an alternative address bar; type the address in there and it would read the Blockchain to figure out the IP address, completely bypassing the whole mess of a DNS system and the current centralized mess of an internet... We could then store all the certs on-chain in a similar way, just make it support the bare minimum necessary to get the browser to shut up and accept the cert whilst maintaining the essential cryptographic security guarantees.
It's kind of ridiculous how easy it would be, technically, to create an alternative internet and DNS system. I think there are already similar solutions like Brave browser supporting a parallel internet with .eth domains but they don't seem to get much attention. There needs to be search engines for these alternative internets to get things going.
Surely once the current internet gets spammed into oblivion and becomes devoid of opportunities, there should be an incentive use create an alternative system from scratch. Surely there is a point when a network of scarce data is better than one of abundant spam data.
Edit: to be clear, I'd not be too surprised if their homegrown client survives an audit unscathed, I'm sure they're a great coder, but the odds just don't seem better than to the alternative of using an existing client that was already audited by professionals as well as other people
I've recently heard similar takes about Gandi but I am out of the loop, can someone explain the controversy? Currently using it for one of my domains and I'd like to know more.
EDIT: tried googling but results are about people whose name is either Gandi or Ghandi, could not find much about Gandi the company.
https://techrights.org/n/2023/12/14/_Video_Lessons_to_be_Lea...
https://blog.cogitactive.com/website/gandi-outrageous-price/
Does anyone know why they're there?
I don't really buy this explanation. It's a very large unsigned number. Everyone knows this. Is there some arbitrary precision library in use that forces large integers to be signed? Even if it were signed, or had the MSB set, it wouldn't change any of the bits, so the key would still be the same. So why would we care about the sign?
OpenSSL is just dumping the raw bytes comprising the value. Tools that don't show a leading zero in this case are doing a bit more interpretation (or just treating it as an unsigned value) to show you the number you expect.
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/math/BigInteg...
You deserialize with a leading 0x80 you don't get a working key. You can check the bit or you can just prepend a 0x00.
This is probably a bug (where an unsigned integer with its high bit set is not printed with a leading 00) and should be reported.
Note that RSA key moduli generated by OpenSSL will always have the high bit set, and so will always have 00 prepended when you ask it to print them. The same is not necessarily true of other integers.
This is trivial to demonstrate:
$ while true ; do openssl genrsa 1024 2>/dev/null | openssl rsa -text 2>/dev/null | grep -A1 modulus | tail -n1 | egrep -v '^\s*00:[89abcdef]' ; done
Everyone knows that an RSA modulus is a very large unsigned number yes. Not everyone knows that every number is unsigned.
> Is there some arbitrary precision library in use that forces large integers to be signed?
OpenSSL's own BN (BigNum) library, which tests if the high bit is set in the input (line 482):
https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/a0d1af6574ae6a0e3872...
> Even if it were signed, or had the MSB set, it wouldn't change any of the bits, so the key would still be the same. So why would we care about the sign?
Because the encoding doesn't care about the context. RFC 3279 specifies that the modulus and exponent are encoded as INTEGERs:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3279#section-2.3.1
... and INTEGERs are signed (which means OpenSSL has to use signedness == SIGNED):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/seccertenrol...
Integer values are encoded into a TLV triplet that begins with a Tag
value of 0x02. The Value field of the TLV triplet contains the encoded
integer if it is positive, or its two's complement if it is negative.
If the integer is positive but the high order bit is set to 1, a leading
0x00 is added to the content to indicate that the number is not negative.
This is exactly the same way that signed integers are represented in e.g. x86 (minus the leading tag and length fields) -- if the leading bit is set, the number is negative.
You're right that it wouldn't change any of the key's bits, but it would change the math performed on them, in a manner that would break it.
Correct for 1024, but...
openssl genrsa 1023 | openssl rsa -text -noout
Also just noticed that openssl rsa actually has a -modulus switch so you can make do with "cut -b9-"
> They haven't earned the right to run with privileges for my private keys and/or ability to frob the web server (as root!)
None of that is needed. You can setup the update system in isolation, redirect the required paths and copy the keys manually. None of that needs to run as root either if you can set the permissions correctly or delegate actions to other processes.
Why not just use JsonCpp then?
https://github.com/open-source-parsers/jsoncpp
It's a native C++ parser which is mature, actively maintained, and likely safer than a low-level C parser implementing its own string buffers.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8555#section-8.4
>2. Query for TXT *records* for the validation domain name
>3. Verify that the contents of *one of the TXT records* match the digest value
(Emphasis mine.)
My problem is with the selected solution: wildcard certificates are a huge compromise waiting to happen. They give an attacker the ability to impersonate _anything_ in my infrastructure for as long as the cert is valid (and even a week is _long_ time for that). Worse, if I'm then distributing the wildcard to everything on my internal network that needs to do anything over HTTPS, that's a lot of potential attack points. (If it's just one TLS-terminating bastion host that's very tightly secured, then...maybe. _Maybe_. But it almost never stays that way.)
To me, it's a much better security tradeoff to accept the hostname problem (or run my own CA internally for stuff that doesn't need a public cert) and avoid wildcards entirely.
Part of not wanting to let go is the sunk cost fallacy. Part of it is being suspicious of being (more) dependent on someone else (than you are already dependent on a different someone else).
(As an aside, the n-gate guy who ranted against HTTPS in general and thought static content should just be HTTP also thought like that. Unfortunately, as I'm at a sketchy cafe using their wifi, his page currently says I should click here to enter my bank details, and I should download new cursors, and oddly doesn't include any of his own content at all. Bit weird, but of course I can trust he didn't modify his page, and it's just a silly unnecessary imposition on him that I would like him to use HTTPS)
Unfortunately for those rugged individuals, you're in a worldwide community of people who want themselves, and you, to be dependent on someone else. We're still going with "trust the CAs" as our security model. But with certificate transparency and mandatory stapling from multiple verifiers, we're going with "trust but verify the CAs".
Maximum acceptable durations for certificates are coming down, down, down. You have to get new ones sooner, sooner, sooner. This is to limit the harm a rogue CA or a naive mis-issuing CA can do, as CRLs just don't work.
The only way that can happen is with automation, and being required to prove you still own a domain and/or a web-server on that domain, to a CA, on a regular basis. No "deal with this once a year" anymore. That's gone and it's not coming back.
It's good to know the whole protocol, and yes certbot can be overbearing, but Debian's python3-certbot + python3-certbot-apache integrates perfectly with how Debian has set up apache2. It shouldn't be a hardship.
And if you don't like certbot, there are lots of other ACME clients.
And if you don't like Let's Encrypt, there are other entities offering certificates via the ACME protocol (YMMV, do you trust them enough to vouch for you?)
Yep, I've seen that argument so many times and it should never make sense to anyone that understands MITM.
The only way it could possibly work is if the static content were signed somehow, but then you need another protocol the browser and you need a way to exchange keys securely, for example like signed RPMs. It would be less expensive as the encryption happens once, but is it worth having yet another implementation?
If you want to ensure the bits that were sent from the server to your browser they must be signed in some method.
Maybe you could have a mixed use case page in the browser where you had your secure context, then a sub context of unencrypted protected objects, that could possibly increase caching. With that said, looks like another fun hole browser makers would be chasing every year or so.
Rather, it's that most people simply don't need to care about MITM. It's not a relevant attack for most content that can be reasonably served over HTTP. The goal isn't to eliminate every security threat possible, it's to eliminate the ones that are actually a problem for your use case.
There's no such thing as "not worth the effort to secure" because neither the site itself nor its content matters, only the network path from the site to the user, which is not under the full control of either party. These need not be, and usually aren't, targeted attacks; they'll hit anything that can be intercepted and modified, without a care for what it's meant to be, where it's coming from, or who it's going to.
Viewing it is an A-to-B interaction where A is a good-natured blogger and B is a tech-savvy reader, and that's all there is to it, is archaic and naive to the point of being dangerous. It is really an A-to-Z interaction where even if A is a good-natured blogger and Z is a tech-savvy user, parties B through Y all get to have a crack at changing the content. Plain HTTP is a protocol for a high-trust environment and the Internet has not been such a place for a very long time. It is unfortunate that party A (the site) must bear the brunt of the security burden, but that's the state of things today. There were other ways to solve this problem but they didn't get widespread adoption.
The browser content model knows nothing if the data it's receiving is static or not.
ISPs had already shown time and again they'd inject content into http streams for their own profit. BGP attacks routed traffic off to random places. Simply put the modern web should be zero trust at all.
>I contacted Rachel and she said - and this is my poor paraphrasing from memory - that the IP ban was something she intentionally implemented but I got caught as a false positive
Professionally it's been cert-manager.
I haven't paid for a TLS certificate in almost a decade I guess.
I don't know much about Caddy scalability but it's worked great for my personal sites.
Is base64-encoded number really something to be mad about?
- Is female [TIL the term "wogrammer"]
- Works for Facebook [formerly Rackspace and Google] so an undeniably Big MAMAA
- Has been blogging prolifically for at least 14 years [let's call it 40 years: she admin'd a BBS at age 12]
- Website is custom self-hosted; very old school and accessible; no ads or popup bullshit
- Probably has more CSE/SWE experience+talent in her little pinky finger than 80% of HN commenters
https://medium.com/wogrammer/rachel-kroll-7944eeb8c692
So I'd say that her position and experience command enough respect that we cannot judge her merely by peeking at a few trifling journal entries.
https://letsencrypt.org/docs/integration-guide/#supported-ke...
This makes me wonder what world of development she is in. Does she prefer SOAP?
If the author says they dislike JSON, especially given the tone of this article with respect to nonsensical protocols, I highly doubt they approve of SOAP.
What would you suggest instead given all these cons?
Not that I'm a fan of JSON, but I fail to conceive anything better as a general purpose protocol.
TCP is just a bunch of bytes... You can't process a bunch of bytes without understanding what they are, and that requires signaling information at a different level (ex - in the bytes themselves as a defined protocol like SSH, SCP, HTTP, etc - or some other pre-shared information between server and client [the worst of protocols - custom bullshit]).
It isn't pretty and you better be able to control the rollout of both sides because backwards compatibility will not be a thing. But I'll take it over a giant pile of code generation in many circumstances
Why is this worse than JSON?
"{'protected': {'protected': { 'protected': 'QABE' }}}" is just as custom as 66537 imo. It's easier to reverse engineer than 66537 but that's not less custom.