One of the Most Alarming Internet Proposals I've Seen

http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001076.html

by seven • 12 years ago

534 91 12 years ago

lauren.vortex.com

vezzy-fnord4• 12 years ago

It actually appears that the RFC openly admits the potentials for abuse here:

"6. Security Considerations

This document addresses proxies that act as intermediary for HTTP2 traffic and therefore the security and privacy implications of having those proxies in the path need to be considered. MITM [4], [I-D.nottingham-http-proxy-problem] and [I-D.vidya-httpbis-explicit-proxy-ps] discuss various security and privacy issues associated with the use of proxies. Users should be made aware that, different than end-to-end HTTPS, the achievable security level is now also dependent on the security features/capabilities of the proxy as to what cipher suites it supports, which root CA certificates it trusts, how it checks certificate revocation status, etc.

Users should also be made aware that the proxy has visibility to the actual content they exchange with Web servers, including personal and sensitive information."

MaulingMonkey2• 12 years ago

To play devil's advocate, this could potentially be less harmful than the existing situation: where e.g. various corporate nets will require you to install root certs to accomplish the same MITM attack, in a less visible fashion (after installation), with some if not all of the same caveats - especially if given the ability to opt out.

(Bugs, insufficiently scary UI, and "discovery" are all massive concerns of course...)

atmosx3• 12 years ago

Hm, no. Various corporate networks doesn't classify as an ISP, the number of potentially abused users is not the same. A company can do whatever it wants to, an ISP offers a service and should respect the privacy of it's costumers, at least theoretically.

quotemstr5• 12 years ago

various corporate nets will require you to install root certs to accomplish the same MITM attack

They don't even bother making you install CA certificates. They just abuse subordinate CAs: see https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2013/02/15/announcing-vers...

I'm also a huge fan of Google's http://www.certificate-transparency.org/, which makes it very difficult to fool very many people for very long.

rubbingalcohol• 12 years ago

Openly admitting the potential for abuse doesn't make this any less ridiculous of a proposal.

vezzy-fnord4• 12 years ago

I'm not saying it does.

sekasi• 12 years ago

Another stab at using 'Trusted proxies' huh? I thought we had learnt that lesson a while ago.. Can we move on please, internet?

samplonius• 12 years ago

The fact is "trusted proxies" are a real thing right now. Plenty of private networks require that you trust one or more private CA roots and all SSL are intercepted and filtered. It is sort of a pain to do. You have to use something like Microsoft System Center to push the root onto all managed computers.

This IETF proposal just formalizes it.

jstsch• 12 years ago

Crazy. If you want to use caching, just use HTTP for that content.

stephenbez• 12 years ago

It's not that simple.

If you are going to use HTTPS, you need to use it for all content on that domain. Otherwise if you load for example a large javascript file over HTTP, the attacker can just poison that file and control your whole page.

Even if you loaded an image from the same domain, your credentials would sent sent as a cookie in plain text.

You could use a separate domain for content as explained here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/5160657/804713

gojomo4• 12 years ago

The web is long overdue for a method to specify an exact resource, by content-hash, from one-of-whatever-sources.

Those sources can then be other less-secure protocols, even those unanticipated by the referrer, because the client got the necessary verifier via the secure-path.

ams6110• 12 years ago

credential-containing cookies should be set as secure.

wmf5• 12 years ago

If HTTP 2.0 requires TLS then to get speed and caching you'll need some kind of trusted proxy.

gnoway• 12 years ago

There was another article on here a week or two ago effectively blasting the http/2.0 wg for doing stupid things. I think it was the "HTTP 308 incompetence expected" article.

Now this. I'm beginning to wonder if I want anything to do with HTTP/2.0.

hobohacker6• 12 years ago

Perhaps you should look at the Hacker News comments on that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7249193. Notably, my comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7249560 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7249869. Basically, the author is wrong.

Lukasa• 12 years ago

Both this article and that one were impressively alarmist. Speaking as someone who has implemented a HTTP/2.0 client stack it's really nothing like as bad as either of these articles makes out.

For once, I invite you to fully read the comments on this post and the one you're referring to. Or, alternatively, take a read of the draft RFCs and the WG mailing list, which is totally open.

wfunction• 12 years ago

Is someone from the NSA behind this?

Sorry, let me rephrase that. Who from the NSA is behind this?

saraid216• 12 years ago

All of them, of course. Believing any less is unpatriotic.

yk• 12 years ago

Apparently the NSA is a intelligence agency. [1] So they are probably not that blunt.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsa

sroerick• 12 years ago

https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg03554....

platypii• 12 years ago

The best part: the "Privacy" section of the document is blank.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-loreto-httpbis-trusted-prox...

atmosx3• 12 years ago

This proposal is so stupid it's hard to believe someone actually made it. Really beats the purpose: Why use SSL? Who am I protecting my data from if the ISP is snooping??? The kid on the Internet Cafe who just found about SSLSnoop?

At this point the right proposal should be to just remove SSL altogether, no need to make circles over it.

quotemstr5• 12 years ago

Er, actually reading the specification, it's about proxying http resources, not https ones. This proposal is strictly better than the transparent proxying that's common on the internet today.

    To distinguish between an HTTP2 connection meant to transport "https"
    URIs resources and an HTTP2 connection meant to transport "http" URIs
    resource, the draft proposes to

       register a new value in the Application Layer Protocol negotiation
       (ALPN) Protocol IDs registry specific to signal the usage of HTTP2
       to transport "http" URIs resources: h2clr.

...

    4.3. Secure Forward Proxy and https URIs


    The Proxy intercepts the TLS ClientHello analyses the application
    layer protocol negotiation extension field and if it contains "h2"
    value it does not do anything and let the TLS handshake continue and
    the TLS session be established between the User-Agent and the Server
    (see Figure 8).

vezzy-fnord4• 12 years ago

Read the rest. You'll see that these proxies also serve as handlers for all TLS sessions.

quotemstr5• 12 years ago

Where does it say that?

bbatsell3• 12 years ago

HTTP/2 changes the meaning of the http:// scheme. All connections will now be TLS-encrypted. (Edit: Maybe not. See hobohacker below.) http:// means that the endpoint has not been verified using the CA system and is using a self-signed certificate (and is thus trivially vulnerable to a MITM should certificate keys not be checked out-of-band).

The purpose is to provide confidentiality to the vast majority of traffic, even if the authentication part of the CIA triangle isn't achieved. This proposal's purpose is to undo that and expose all traffic using the http:// scheme to your ISP, exactly as it is today. (I would also note that this draft is proposed by AT&T, which is now rolling out new plans in Austin that charge an extra $30/month if you do NOT agree to them inspecting and data-mining all of your internet activity and selling it to advertisers.)

quotemstr5• 12 years ago

http:// means that the endpoint has not been verified using the CA system and is using a self-signed certificate (and is thus trivially vulnerable to a MITM should certificate keys not be independently checked).

Right. I understand that. The lack of certificate verification for the http scheme means that ISPs can MITM HTTP traffic with or without this proposal, just like they can with HTTP/1.1.

So how does this proposal make things worse?

new plans in Austin that charge an extra $30/month if you do NOT agree to them inspecting and data-mining all of your web browsing and selling it to advertisers

Really? That's a special kind of evil and should be illegal.

natrius• 12 years ago

Can you elaborate on those AT&T plans?

hobohacker6• 12 years ago

HTTP/2 does not change the meaning of http://. That's the opportunistic encryption proposal: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-httpbis-alt-svc-.... For more information, you can see https://insouciant.org/tech/http-slash-2-considerations-and-....

derefr2• 12 years ago

This proposal's purpose is to ... expose all traffic using the http:// scheme to your ISP, exactly as it is today.

Isn't that a semantic requirement of HTTP, though? Half of the "tech" in the HTTP/1.X spec is to allow for caching of resources and responses by proxies, allowing anyone between the client and server (e.g. your ISP) to act as a CDN.

HTTPS/1.X effectively throws that away by doing end-to-end encryption. It's a trade-off: we gain the surety that all the responses are coming directly from the peer, rather than anyone else... but the web becomes 90% less cacheable, because the only places things can end up cached are between the client and the HTTPS pipe (i.e. the browser cache), or between the HTTPS pipe and the server (i.e. "reverse proxies" like Nginx.)

The current workaround for this, when you need caching for your Big Traffic on either ingress or egress, is to do what amounts to purposeful self-MITMing of your HTTPS session: to terminate HTTPS on a caching proxy, that holds the certificate of your client/server, and acts as if it were you, while itself doing another HTTPS session for "the last mile" to connect to you. This is what companies do when they deploy their own CA-cert to their networks, so everyone's access can be proxied through their own system; and this is what services like Cloudflare do when they sit "in front of" your server while not being a part of your company's VPN at all.

Basically, HTTP2 codifies this workaround, and calls it HTTP.

mst2• 12 years ago

I think the crucial thing to understanding this is this diagram -

               UserAgent             Proxy                 Server
                      TLS Session #1        TLS Session #2
                      <------------>       <------------->
                                     HTTP
                      <----------------------------------->

which makes it clear that the point is to be able to say "I trust this proxy sufficiently that I'm ok with it acting as an intermediary, but I still don't want my stuff in the clear between me and the proxy or between the proxy and the far end server."

So it's about enabling the user to trust -only- the proxy, whereas currently in order to get utility out of a proxy you need to send the traffic as plain HTTP which then trusts both the proxy and the networks over which the data will travel.

That seems to me to absolutely meet the requirements for "strictly better".

mirkules2• 12 years ago

If your definition of "better" is simply "faster", then yes, it is better. If you care about security of your data, end-to-end, this is worse (as others have pointed out because of your ISP being a MitM). In addition, now we are introducing another vector of attack for bad guys to exploit - how enticing does it sound that every ISP becomes a root certificate authority, essentially?

bachback2• 12 years ago

SSL is such crap. time to make a better internet.

nathancahill• 12 years ago

With blackjack and hookers?

dijit• 12 years ago

he's not wrong about SSL being poor.. rather, the CA system is what I consider to be poor.

there was the idea of notaries that never took off, but that would be ideal imho.

wmf5• 12 years ago

This article ignores the context behind the proposal. Many companies, schools, and prisons are MITMing all SSL traffic today for a variety of liability reasons. Today those users get no notice that their Web browsing is being observed and censored. Trusted proxies are intended to give those users some notice that they're being MITMed.

I agree that MITM proxies shouldn't be used on the public Internet and thus we shouldn't make it easier to do so, but what about the people who are already being MITMed? Is there another way to solve this problem or must we throw corporate Web users under the bus to save the public?

hobohacker6• 12 years ago

As Patrick McManus says in http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2013OctDec/...:

If someone can install a root cert onto your computer then you are already owned - there is no end to the other things they can do too. Call it a virus, call it an enterprise, but call it a day - you're owned and there is no in-charter policy this working group can enact to change the security level of that user for good or for bad..

The good news is not everyone is already owned and SSL helps those people today.

rdl• 12 years ago

There are some kinda legitimate uses for this in certain environments -- enterprise DLP, various kinds of filtering, etc. Potentially even caching and stuff on the distant end of really weird network connections (when I go to Mars in ~30y, I'd like to have as much cached as possible, and converted to message-based vs. connection-oriented protocols).

We have good enough workarounds for this right now (putting wildcard CA certs on devices and proxying that way), but they're not awesome. So, if there were a way to keep this from being used for evil, it could make some existing non-evil activities easier.

But, on balance, the risk of evil might be too high.

JoshTriplett• 12 years ago

There are potentially legitimate (though still sketchy) reasons to MITM HTTPS traffic from a host configured to allow that (for instance, by trusting an organizational CA). There are no legitimate reasons to MITM HTTPS traffic without the host's knowledge.

lifeisstillgood3• 12 years ago

Ok - here is a suggestion: The Right to root.

Just as a citizens letters, papers and home are inviolable, should our new papers our new homes be also inviolable - if I own a device, No-one should legally be allowed control over it?

wmf5• 12 years ago

This proposal is mostly intended for environments where the users do not own the equipment, like offices and schools.

But yeah, if you paid for it but can't root it, you got ripped off.

MichaelGG• 12 years ago

You'd need to follow it up with a "Right to Own" whereby you can't lease or rent devices to people.

TophWells• 12 years ago

if I own a device, No-one should legally be allowed control over it?

Then tech companies might start leasing out their devices: you technically don't own it, so you're not allowed to do what you want to it.

Not that the Right to Root wouldn't be nice, but the change in attitude has to come first. And we need to somehow convince the likes of Apple that their DRM is bad for business.

lifeisstillgood3• 12 years ago

if someone leases me a notebook, do they get the right to read what I write in it? seems unlikely.

friendzis• 12 years ago

Wasn't that written from a mac/ipad?

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

I've become increasingly more disgusted with IETF since I found out they have at least a few NSA agents working with them on protocols, and more importantly refusing to kick them out - even after all the Snowden revelations with NSA trying to subvert and undermine encryption protocols:

http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/fosdem/2014/Janson/Sunday/NSA_oper...

Then I find out that they've been working with Cisco on another similar thing to this one for "legal intercepts", a.k.a "trusted backdoors", like we're seeing above.

https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-dc-10/Cross_Tom/Bl...

With NIST being already corrupted by the NSA, and now W3C becoming corrupted by MPAA, too, I think we're seeing the decay and fall of the "standard bodies", because I don't believe the Internet will tolerate these moves. The Internet will ignore them, do its own thing, and make it popular. I think future standards will be built from the bottom-up, and if I'm not mistaken most of the Internet so far has been built that way anyway.

wmf5• 12 years ago

If you consider a standards body corrupt because they have a single member you disagree with, you might be failing at politics.

666c6f• 12 years ago

It's not like they are just some "ordinary" bad guys, like A&T, who just want to make some bucks. The NSA is one of the most dangerous enemys to free speech and the freedom of the Internet. There is a high chance that they are going to undermine all our efforts to make a free and secure internet.

hobohacker6• 12 years ago

The specification indeed is about proxying http resources, not https ones. So it's not initially as alarming as some other proposals discussing trusting proxies to intercept SSL connections. For more details, you can refer to https://insouciant.org/tech/http-slash-2-considerations-and-....

This specific proposal is interesting because it specifically is related to opportunistic encryption proposals, in particular, the one that allows sending http:// URIs over an unauthenticated TLS connection: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-httpbis-alt-svc-.... The problem here for proxies is, if you mix http and https (authenticated) traffic on the same TLS connection, the proxy cannot tell if it can safely MITM the connection. The proxy vendor would like to know if it can do so, probably for network management / caching / content modification reasons. Of course, the point of the opportunistic encryption proposal is to increase security (although its actual effective impact is controversial: https://insouciant.org/tech/http-slash-2-considerations-and-...). But if you believe in opportunistic encryption's security purposes, then it doesn't seem to really make sense to make the MITM'able traffic identifiable so proxies on the network path can successfully MITM them without detection.

userbinator• 12 years ago

The amusing thing about this is that MITM can also be used to one's personal benefit -- I run a local filtering proxy that strips off most of the crap on the majority of sites, and I've had to do a bit of hex editing to be able to do that without the browser complaining.

Look at it another way: With browsers becoming more and more unconfigurable and nearing the point of being user-hostile, it is any wonder that the content providers would want their content, whether or not the user likes it, to be delivered unchanged and forced upon the user? All the Snowden stuff has made us feel that way, but what I'm saying is that the one who is doing the MITM isn't always malicious.

SudoNick• 12 years ago

Yes! If you don't have a reasonably easy way to inspect and modify what is being sent over the encrypted connections your device makes, you are in very serious trouble. Your device will be [ab]used against you.

news_to_me• 12 years ago

The most alarming thing about this article is the author's tone.

droopybuns• 12 years ago

Carriers are fighting against being turned into dumb pipes.

Google is fighting to turn carriers into dumb pipes.

I can't take this Google consultant seriously in that context.

crististm• 12 years ago

Carriers _are_ dumb pipes. Carriers are fighting to get rid of that. Internet _is_ dump pipes connected together. Carriers are fighting against that.

glifchits• 12 years ago

When I read the title I thought this was going to be from Upworthy.

kercker• 12 years ago

Maybe he who proposes this proposal is just meant to be funny.

the_watcher• 12 years ago

I'm not an expert in internet security or crypto. Some of the comments below raise some interesting points both defending the intent (and implementation) of it and pointing out the flaws. However, as an unsophisticated person interested in my data security, this sounds absolutely awful. Hopefully more clarity on this emerges.

One of the Most Alarming Internet Proposals I've Seen

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