Re: WS/Service Workers, TLS and future apps - [was Re: HTTP is just fine]

I don't think there is universal agreement among browser engineers (if
anyone agrees at all) with your assertion that the Tor protocol or even Tor
hidden services are "more secure than TLS".  TLS in modern browsers
requires RSA 2048-bit or equivalent authentication, 128-bit symmetric key
confidentiality and SHA-256 or better integrity.    If .onion identifiers
and the Tor protocol crypto were at this level of strength, it would be
reasonable to argue that a .onion connection represented a "secure
context", and proceed from there.  In the meantime, with .onion site
security (without TLS) at 80-bits of truncation of a SHA-1 hash of a 1024
bit key, I don't think you'll get much traction in insisting it is
equivalent to or better than TLS.

On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 7:52 AM Aymeric Vitte <vitteaymeric@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Redirecting this to WebApps since it's probable that we are facing a
> design mistake that might amplify by deprecating non TLS connections. I
> have submitted the case to all possible lists in the past, never got a
> clear answer and was each time redirected to another list (ccing
> webappsec but as a whole I think that's a webapp matter, so please don't
> state only that "downgrading a secure connection to an insecure one is
> insecure").
>
> The case described below is simple:
>
> 1- https page loading the code, the code establishes ws + the Tor
> protocol to "someone" (who can be a MITM or whatever, we don't care as
> explained below)
>
> 2- http page loading the code, the code establishes ws + the Tor protocol
>
> 3- https page loading the code, the code establishes wss + the Tor protocol
>
> 4- https page loading the code, the code establishes normal wss connections
>
> 3 fails because the WS servers have self-signed certificates.
>
> What is insecure between 1 and 2? Obviously this is 2, because loading
> the code via http.
>
> Even more, 1 is more secure than 4, because the Tor protocol is more
> secure than TLS.
>
> It's already a reality that projects are using something like 1 and will
> continue to build systems on the same principles (one can't argue that
> such systems are unsecure or unlikely to happen, that's not true, see
> the Flashproxy project too).
>
> But 1 fails too, because ws is not allowed inside a https page, so we
> must use 2, which is insecure and 2 might not work any longer later.
>
> Service Workers are doing about the same, https must be used, as far as
> I understand Service Workers can run any browser instance in background
> even if the spec seems to focus more on the offline aspects, so I
> suppose that having 1 inside a (background) Service Worker will fail too.
>
> Now we have the "new" "progressive Web Apps" which surprisingly present
> as a revolution the possibility to have a web app look like a native app
> while it can be done on iOS since the begining, same thing for some
> offline caching features that were possible before, but this indeed
> brings new things, hopefully we can have one day something like all the
> cordova features inside browsers + background/headless browser instances.
>
> So we are talking about web apps here, not about a web page loading
> plenty of http/https stuff, web apps that can be used as
> independant/native apps or nodes to relay traffic and therefore discuss
> with some entities that can't be tied to a domain and can only use
> self-signed certificates (like WebRTC peers, why do we have a security
> exception here allowing something for WebRTC and not for this case?).
>
> Then 1 must be possible with WS and Service Workers, because there are
> no reasons why it should not be allowed and this will happen in the
> future under different forms (see the link below), that's not illogical,
> if you use wss then you expect it to work as such (ie fail with
> self-signed certificates for example), if you use ws (what terrible
> things can happen with ws exactly? ws can't access the DOM or whatever)
> then you are on your own and should better know what you are doing,
> that's not a reason to force you to use much more insecure 2.
>
> Such apps can be loaded while navigating on a web site, entirely (ie the
> web site is the app), or for more wide distribution from different sites
> than the original app site via an iframe (very ugly way) or extracted as
> a component (cool way, does not seem to be foreseen by anybody) with
> user prompt/validation ("do you want to install application X?")
> possibly running in background when needed in a sandboxed context with
> service workers.
>
> Le 25/11/2015 17:43, Aymeric Vitte a écrit :
> >
> >
> > Le 20/11/2015 12:35, Richard Barnes a écrit :
> >> On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 8:40 AM, Hanno Böck <hanno@hboeck.de> wrote:
> >>
> >>>> It's amazing how the same wrong arguments get repeated again and
> >>>> again...
> >>>>
> >> +1000
> >>
> >> All of these points have been raised and rebutted several times.  My
> >> favorite reference is:
> >>
> >>
> https://konklone.com/post/were-deprecating-http-and-its-going-to-be-okay
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> > You might not break the current internet but its future.
> >
> > Example: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=917829
> >
> > How do you intend to solve this? ie the case of an entity that just
> > cannot have valid certificates and/or implements a secure protocol on
> > top of an insecure one (ws here for Peersm project, the other party can
> > be by design a "MITM" but we completely don't care per the secure
> > protocol used, the MITM will not know what happens next)?
> >
> > Like WebRTC too, but there is an exception for that one, self-signed
> > certificates are (by some luck) accepted.
> >
> > It's obvious that browsers will be used for new services involving those
> > mechanisms in the future, like P2P systems as sketched here:
> >
> https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2015-November/015680.html
> >
>
> --
> Get the torrent dynamic blocklist: http://peersm.com/getblocklist
> Check the 10 M passwords list: http://peersm.com/findmyass
> Anti-spies and private torrents, dynamic blocklist:
> http://torrent-live.org
> Peersm : http://www.peersm.com
> torrent-live: https://github.com/Ayms/torrent-live
> node-Tor : https://www.github.com/Ayms/node-Tor
> GitHub : https://www.github.com/Ayms
>
>

Received on Monday, 30 November 2015 20:01:32 UTC