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0 pointsdcow4y ago0 comments

Re configurable TLS: TLS 1.3 allows services to perfectly pin certs and reject your custom root CA. It breaks the flow you are talking about that has worked up to 1.2. The answer is to not build a myopic protocol/technology that only cares about 1 dimension of usage.

Re mac addresses: I’m not saying there aren’t valid reasons for people to want these changes. I’m asking the user be allowed to configure their privacy posture at the protocol level rather than assuming all users want i finite anonymity. Maybe you care about someone following your phone around in public but maybe at home you want to enable secure neighbor discovery and give your stationary devices strong link-level identity…

My point is it’s complicated and “privacy at all costs” is not a one-size-fits-all silver bullet solution.

I never argued these problems aren't real and only hypothetical. I’m asking to be given the ability at the protocol level to make informed decisions as to where I fall on the privacy vs security axis rather than be wholly subject to protocols that assume I always want maximum privacy.

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vlovich1234y ago

Yeah cert pinning is annoying but there's competing interests over that. The application vendors don't want you to be able to inspect the data & generally that's true as well. The niche debugging/analysis use-case can still typically be managed by disabling cert pinning once you have root (unless the application has its own TLS implementation which gets trickier).

re mac address == strong link level identity, it was never that and using it in that sense isn't accomplishing much. MAC addresses are trivial to spoof. If you want identity, then use proper cryptographic mechanisms to establish that (e.g. mTLS).

What we've seen as a profession is that that level of flexibility makes things harder to configure correctly leading to various security vulnerabilities. Or the optionality being user facing makes it not user friendly and makes it easy to socially engineer attacks. It sucks but in practice we've not found a way to optimize along several axes simultaneously. Don't forget that all your optional features is stuff someone has to build, implement, test & maintain. The only way out I think is to demonstrate a way forward that manages to attain the goals you seek without sacrificing the technical privacy measure. The technical privacy measures have been put in place as a result of real-world lessons learned, not hypothetical things.

Lukasa4y ago

> Re configurable TLS: TLS 1.3 allows services to perfectly pin certs and reject your custom root CA. It breaks the flow you are talking about that has worked up to 1.2. The answer is to not build a myopic protocol/technology that only cares about 1 dimension of usage.

No it doesn't. I have no idea what technology you think this is (maybe HPKP?), but installing a local root CA absolutely continues to work in all browsers with TLS 1.3.

dcowOP4y ago

TLS proxies need to be able to inspect the server certificate response in order to dynamically generate an appropriate certificate. This flow doesn't work in TLS 1.3 since the certificate is encrypted to prevent MITM.

aisio4y ago

MITM for TLSv1.3 is possible. Plenty of solutions available for enterprises to do this. The MITM occurs still happens for TLSv1.3 on key exchange, allowing for the subsequent certificate to also be MITM and be replaced and encrypted. The only real affect TLSv1.3 has for MITM is that company policies for decryption can't match on the cert to determine if decrypt should occur, but they can still use the SNI which is plaintext

dcowOP4y ago

I thought combined with encrypted SNI this was no longer possible since the middleware doesn't have access to that information.

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vlovich1234y ago

Lukasa4y ago

No it doesn't. I have no idea what technology you think this is (maybe HPKP?), but installing a local root CA absolutely continues to work in all browsers with TLS 1.3.

dcowOP4y ago

aisio4y ago

dcowOP4y ago

I thought combined with encrypted SNI this was no longer possible since the middleware doesn't have access to that information.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse