On Mar 20, 2017 3:36 PM, "Vara La Fey" <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
OMG!!
First of all, you'd be mis-educating them if telling them that
certificate "validity" has any real meaning. (But now you're
talking about http.)
I mean validity as in trusted roots that have been shipped with
your OS or browser. Surely you don't mean these are meaningless.
AFAIK they are very reliable as long as you never accept bogus
certs. If you accept bogus certs "all the time", I really hope
you know what you're doing. Pretty much any important site should
have working SSL.
There is a reason why all the browsers freak out when you get a
bad cert, but users still click "add exception". My captive
education portal would give real consequence to this with the 3
minute power point slideshow and mandatory quiz. I wonder if this
is already patented. . .
Second, why do you think you have any right to put speed bumps
in the way of people who are doing nothing to you?
Plenty of businesses do this already for captive portals and
forcing users to log in, pay, or accept an EULA. They are already
tampering with your SSL connection in order to redirect you to the
portal. I'm just suggesting to use this technology for
"educational" purposes.
Third, if your grandmother needs internet "safety" education,
just educate her, or refuse to keep fixing the problems she
encounters in her ignorance - if she really is all that
ignorant. I hope you wouldn't install a browser re-direct
without her consent, because then you'd be just any other
malware propagator with just any other self-righteous
rationalization.
Well, I'm lazy. I'd much rather have an ongoing passive education
program for anyone that uses that router. Maybe only 1 in 1000
requests trigger the "test", or once a month per mac address
maybe. If grandma fails the test I can get an email so I can call
her up and gently chastise her. "Grandmaaaa, did you accept a
bogus SSL certificate again? Hmmm?"
As far as consent goes, I'm only talking about routers you own or
have permission to modify. That should go without saying.
Fourth, if /you /need educational "speed bumps" on /your
/router, /you /are free to have them. One of the great things
about freedom - from government or from meddling busybodies -
is that /you /get to be free too.
My post is in the context of businesses or individuals that
provide Internet to the public. Presumably businesses and
individuals have the freedom to do this kind of SSL interception,
since they've already been doing it for years without any
repercussions. Personally I'm disturbed that businesses will try
to get me to accept their SSL cert for their Wi-Fi portal, but I
know the technology leaves little choice. One trick is to ignore
the cert and try again with a non SSL address.
It is pretty ironic that the first thing these captive portals ask
users to do is blindly accept a bogus SSL cert. It is really just
a sad state of affairs that we are literally training people to
accept bad SSL certificates.
For years my Firefox has had an option to "always use HTTPS",
and I'm sure all other modern browsers do as well. Plus,
Mozilla.org <http://Mozilla.org/> has a free plugin - I think
it's from EFF.org <http://EFF.org/> - called "HTTPS
Everywhere". It's all very easy to use, and will be almost
entirely transparent to Grandma.
This won't do anything to protect you/grandma from bogus ssl
certs. Imagine connecting to a bad AP at Starbucks that is
proxying all your SSL connections. Your only defense is trusted
roots and knowing not to accept bogus SSL certs. If only we had a
captive router-based SSL education program... ;)
On 3/20/2017 3:14 PM, Brien Dieterle wrote:
A system like I described would just be an "educational tool"
to encourage people to use HTTPS (properly). It wouldn't
stop you from accepting bogus certificates-- just a speed
bump. Now that I've thought about it I'd really like to
install something like this on my grandparent's router. . .
heck, my own router. . .
On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 2:50 PM, Vara La Fey
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Oh HELL no!! What kind of hall-monitor nanny mentality do
you want people to adopt??
I accept "bogus" certificates all the time because the
whole idea of certificates is crap in the first place -
they are NOT maintained - and years ago I got tired of
that procedure warning me about "invalid" certificates
for sites that were perfectly valid.
I've never had a problem. Of course I'm also careful
where I go, certificate or not.
- Vara
On 3/20/2017 2:12 PM, Brien Dieterle wrote:
Maybe every commercial router should do SSL interception
by default. If a user accepts a bogus certificate they
are taken to a page that thoroughly scolds them and
informs them about the huge mistake they made, forces
them to read a few slides and take a quiz on network
safety before allowing them on the Internet. Maybe do
the same for non-ssl HTTP traffic, etc.. .
On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 1:55 PM, Matt Graham
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Victor Odhner
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I’m really annoyed that so many companies
offer open WIFI when it would be
so easy to secure those hot spots.
Restaurants, hotels, and the waiting
rooms of auto dealerships are almost 100% open.
[snip]
On 2017-03-20 13:20, Stephen Partington wrote:
This is usually done as a means to be easy for
their customers.
Pretty much this. Convenience is more valuable than
security in most people's minds.
they’d be happy to do the right thing if we
could explain it to the right people.
I'm not sure this would happen. Setting up passwords
and then distributing those passwords has a non-zero
cost and offers zero visible benefits for most of
the people who are using the wireless networks.[0]
And as another poster said, what about
football/baseball stadiums? Distributing passwords
to tens of thousands of people is sort of difficult.
"Just watching the game" is not an option; people
want to FaceTweet pictures of themselves at the game.
OTOH, the last time I looked at the access points
visible from my living room, almost all of them had
some sort of access control enabled. Maybe there's a
social convention forming that "my access point" ~=
"my back yard" and "open access point" ~= "a public
park"?
[0] Having a more educated user population would
make the benefits more visible, but it's very
difficult to make people care about these things.
--
Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress
There is no Darkness in Eternity
But only Light too dim for us to see.
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