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

Le 01/12/2015 05:31, Brad Hill a écrit :
> Let's keep this discussion civil, please.  

Maybe some wording was a little tough below, apologies for this, the
logjam attack is difficult to swallow, how something that is supposed to
protect forward secrecy can do quietly the very contrary without even
having the keys compromised, it's difficult to understand too why TLS
did not implement a mechanism to protect the DH client public key.

> 
> The reasons behind blocking of non-secure WebSocket connections from
> secure contexts are laid out in the following document:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/mixed-content/
> 
> A plaintext ws:// connection does not meet the requirements of
> authentication, encryption and integrity, so far as the user agent is
> able to tell, so it cannot allow it.  

The spec just mentions to align the behavior of ws to xhr, fetch and
eventsource without giving more reasons, or I missed them.

Let's concentrate on ws here.

As far as I see it, a "mixed content" has the word "content", which is
supposed to designate something that can be included in a web page and
therefore be dangerous.

WS cannot include anything in a page by itself, it is designed to
discuss with external entities, for other purposes than fetching
resources (images, js, etc) from web servers that are logically tied to
a domain, in that case you can use xhr or other fetching means instead.

Therefore it is logical to envision that those external entities used
with WS are not necessarily web servers and might not have valid
certificates.

WS cannot hurt anything unless the application decides to insert the
results in the page, which is not something problematic with WS only,
the application is loaded via https, so is supposed to be secure but if
it is doing wrong things nothing can save you, even wss.

Unlike usual fetching means, in case of malicious use WS cannot really
hurt like scaning URLs, this is a specific protocol not talked by anybody.

As a result of the current policy, if we want to establish WS with
entities that can't have a valid certificate, we must load the code via
http which is obviously completely insecure.

So forbiding WS with https is just putting the users at risk and prevent
any current or future uses of ws with entities that can't have a valid
certificate, therefore reducing the interest and potential of ws to
something very small.


> 
> If there is a plausible mechanism by which browsers could distinguish
> external communications which meet the necessary security criteria using
> protocols other than TLS or authentication other than from the Web PKI,
> there is a reasonable case to be made that such could be considered as
> potentially secure origins and URLs.  (as has been done to some extent
> for WebRTC, as you have already noted)
> 

To some extent yes... maybe some other solutions could be studied via
something like letsencrypt to get automatically something like temporary
valid certificates (which then might eliminate the main topic of this
discussion if feasible)


> If you want to continue this discussion here, please:
> 
> 1) State your use cases clearly for those on this list who do not
> already know them.  You want to "use the Tor protocol" over websockets? 

Note: I am not affiliated at all to the Tor project

Yes, that's already a reality with projects such as Peersm and Flashproxy.

Peersm has the onion proxy function inside browsers which establishes
Tor circuits with Tor nodes using WS.

Flashproxy connects a censored Tor user to a Tor node and relays the Tor
protocol using WS between both.

> To connect to what?  Why? 

The Tor protocol is just an example, let's see it as another secure
protocol.

If we go further, we can imagine what I described here:
https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2015-November/015680.html

Which mentions the "browsing paradox" too.

Not usual I believe (last paragraph, the idea is not to proxy only to
URLs as it is today but to proxy to interfaces, such as ws,xhr and
WebRTC), but this will happen one day (maybe I should patent this too...)

Applications are numerous and not restricted to those examples.

 Why is it important to bootstrap an
> application like this over regular http(s) instead of, for example, as
> an extension or modified user-agent like TBB?

The Tor Browser is designed for secure browsing, because for example
solving the "browsing paradox" and having the onion proxy inside
browsers is not enough to insure secure anonymous browsing, Tor
Browser's features will still be required.

Some applications need some modifications of the browser, some others
need extensions but plenty of applications could be installed from the
web sites directly.

The obvious advantages are: no installation, works on any
device/platform, no dev/maintenance of the application for different
platforms with the associated risks (sw integrity) and complexity for
the users (not talking here about the problematic aspect of code loading
for a web app, that's not the subject, but for sure this must happen
over https, not http).

For example, a usual means to disseminate Flashproxy is to install an
iframe on many sites, if I install a Flashproxy iframe on my web site,
the users navigating on this web site will relay the traffic for
censored people.

But I think we agree that iframes are not the future, I could install a
tag/component on my web site representing the Flashproxy app, when a
user navigates on my site it could be asked if he wants to install the
flashproxy app, which then would be extracted from the original
Flashproxy site and could run in background in a service worker, so the
user will continue to relay data after he left the site or after he
closed his browser.

Same thing for uProxy, Peersm, etc.

> 
> 2) Describe clearly why and how the protocol you propose to use meets
> the necessary guarantees a user expects from an https page.
> 

If we take the Tor protocol, by design it cannot really authenticate
(but fulfills the other requirements) the corresponding party, it can
just check that it has established a connection with someone that has
indeed the certificate used for the TLS connection and that is known as
a valid node by the network, who can be anybody.

Anybody could invent another protocol that would work with ws and
fulfill the mixed content requirements, or not, but again what does it
hurt? If the application has decided to do stupid things then even wss
cannot protect.

If ws is intercepted then by design this is not supposed to be a problem
if the protocol used is secure, and if it's not secure then don't use
this app.


> 3) Describe clearly how the user agent can determine, before any
> degradation in the security state of the context is possible, that only
> a protocol meeting these requirements will be used.
>

That seems difficult, unless the browsers has the modules built-in or
can validate the modules allowed, a bit like extensions but for web
apps, but this looks restrictive.

But, again, is it really required for WS?


> Ad-hominem and security nihilism of the forms "TLS / PKI is worthless so
> why bother trying to enforce any security guarantees" or "other insecure
> configurations like starting with http are allowed, so why not allow
> this insecure configuration, too" are not appropriate or a good use of
> anyone's time on this list.  Please refrain from continuing down these
> paths.
> 
> thank you,
> 
> Brad Hill, as co-chair
> 
> On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 6:25 PM Florian Bösch <pyalot@gmail.com
> <mailto:pyalot@gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 10:45 PM, Richard Barnes
>     <rbarnes@mozilla.com <mailto:rbarnes@mozilla.com>> wrote:
> 
>         1. Authentication: You know that you're talking to who you think
>         you're talking to.
> 
> 
>     And then Dell installs a their own root authority on machines they
>     ship, or your CA of choice gets pwn'ed or the NSA uses some
>     undisclosed backdoor in the EC they managed to smuggle into the
>     constants, or somebody combines a DNS poison/grab with a non
>     verified (because piss poor CA) double certificate, or you hit one
>     of the myriad of bugs that've plaqued TLS implementations
>     (particularly certain large and complex ones that're basically one
>     big ball of gnud which shall remain unnamed). 
> 

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Received on Tuesday, 1 December 2015 13:42:39 UTC