- From: Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>
- Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:40:15 +0200
- To: Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>
- Cc: Martin Thomson <martin.thomson@gmail.com>, HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
Hi,
On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 08:06:35AM +0200, Henry Story wrote:
> For example if I am reading a blog from an author I trust and he writes
> a review of his good experience shopping in some small company, a story I heard
> perhaps through other channels and have every reason to trust, and I
> click on the link to go to that site, but a man in the middle attacker
> has replace the link to the site he was writing about with a link to his
> proxy (in order to take the money sent to the payment links he controls),
> then it will be very easy to fool me.
I'm totally amazed by the fact that :
a) people consider that the web is only *web pages* risking of being
mangled by man-in-the-middle attacks, but don't consider all the
other components that represent zero value but neet to be quickly
delivered. Eg: off-site components such as visitor counters which
nobody cares about but which should be very fast, or ads for which the
ads providers don't necessarily want to inflate their infrastructure
costs.
b) we're keeping focused on the risk of having a blog page modified by
an MITM while the *only* real issue right now (I mean what makes people
*lose money* in the real world) is malware running in browsers and
taking away all of their information or even acting as themselves on
secure web sites. What's the point of securing blogs when connecting
to banks over TLS is already unsafe ?
We'll just lower the overall security by applying the same security
enforcement to all sites. Connecting to your bank or to you WiFi
router's admin page will look equally safe. I don't think this is the
intent of this move, really.
Willy
Received on Wednesday, 28 March 2012 06:40:46 UTC