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Simi-related fun fact.
The biggest contributor to TOR is the CIA. They funded it's creation and are primarily responsible for maintaining it to this day.
The CIA maintains TOR as a way for spies to pass information over the internet. They make it public because if only spies used TOR it would be trivial to catch them. So it's in their interest that it be public and secure. It's open source and security experts agree you can trust it.
So since this, according yo you, is a fact, I do suppose you have evidence to this claim? And I'm talking evidence that can be corroborated, not a Facebook post or something from a conspiracy sub, and not "oh man, everybody knows this!" because everybody doesn't know this.
I thougnt it was the Navy, not CIA itself
The CIA, not navy intelligence?
The core principle of Tor, known as onion routing, was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, to protect American intelligence communications online.
Let's encrypt is very transparent and has been designed to be auditable. What are you worried about exactly?
uncle sam. audit away. until sam says “give me the keys” and then sam has the keys
The transparency logs would mean that any rouge certificates created would leave a paper trail not to mention there is nothing stopping them from issuing a certificate for any domain of their choosing
@flandish @possiblylinux127 Letsencrypt just has the public keys, no private keys. If Letsencrypt gives my public keys to sam, it does not matter, because public keys are public. My private key is under my administration only.
and the backdoor?
@flandish Which backdoor? When I request a CA for a certificate, I send the public key to the CA. The CA does a validation and signs the certificate.
The CA does not see any traffic from my server. A man-in-the-middle needs my private key, which is under my administration. If I loose my private key, it does not matter if the certificate is signed by a US based CA or an European CA.
@flandish If US authorities want to fake my server, they can use any CA, regardless which CA I originally used.
Of course, US authorities can force Letsencrypt to revoke my certificates and block any renewing. This is very unlikely to happen. If it happens, I have to change my CA. There would be a downtime for my private services, but there is no data corruption or data loss on my servers.
force
and there’s your backdoor. that’s my whole point. don’t trust this gov.
Said backdoor isn't possible with the current day key exchange process. Without the servers in use private key, the most law agencies can do without acquiring the private key is force the CA to revoke a cert, which will disallow properly configured clients from accessing and transferring data with the server.
LE doesn't have enough information to recreate the private key based off the public key, the only key distributed during the CSR process is the servers public key via a certificate signing request which is signed using your private key, which the CA then signs with it's own intermediate key (which is signed by it's root server certificate) and hands back to the private server.
The CA doesn't have the ability to create that private key, and as such doesn't have a way to decrypt traffic that is using that key. There is no concern for a backdoor in that process.
In order for the "backdoor" to exist, they would need to either copy the private key as part of the signing process (which it doesn't), or somehow force the server admin to use a new private key (that the CA also holds) or somehow compromise the servers key generation process to allow for an escrow on the private key when it was generated which would allow the CA to be able to recreate the private key using the master & public key.
Now don't take me wrong, you can still have a MiTM impersonation attack or a full impersonation bypass by the CA issuing a new certificate and having the DNS registrar have the web address go to a new server that is using the new key but, that's not something the CA alone has the capability of doing, and any traffic that is issued to the original server still wouldn't be compromised, its just clients visiting your site will end up at the other site and as such will end up using keys that the other side generated instead of your own keys and additionally said new keys would also be appearing in Certificate transparency logs, or modern day clients would refuse to use them.
@flandish This is no backdoor. This is an denial of service. It's a big difference. I have to estimate the risk and decide if I want to take it. ZeroSSL uses the infrastructure of Sectigo, an US company. Sectigo can pull the plug very easily. So it is no alternative. Maybe Actalis or Certum are good alternatives. But the government of Poland has not been unproblematic in the past.
That the U.S. government can arbitrarily take down websites by revoking certificates issued by let's encrypt? How obvious can it be? I wondered the same thing as OP months ago. We need european alternatives. I think there are some, have some bookmarked somewhere.
Certificate revocation is a joke and has been for over a decade
Orion browser (maybe safari?) on iOS detected the revoked certificate, and asked me to confirm before accessing the website while warning about the dangers.
Does regular safari show the same prompt? Afaik, browsers on iOS are safari reskins, so I'm curious if they added his cert in directly again, or if the onion browser actually follows standards the os browser doesn't.
Yes, but safari doesn't even let me ignore the warning, it has a explanation in detail, and only allows closing the website.
Huh, FF on Android doesn't care.
Most browsers don't, hence my calling revocation a joke.
So many in this thread are up in arms about something the majority of browsers don't care about and have actively ignored for as long as I can recall
Yeah, I was just surprised bc the page explicitly lauds FF for checking revocation.
It may only be the desktop version, most mobile browsers aren't as feature complete as their desktop counterparts.
But, given Google ripped revocation checking out of chromium, I wouldn't be surprised if they nerfed it in Android too...
If the certificate only lasts two months revocation isn’t necessary, just deny recertification.
There are some commercial Certificate Authorities that offer free certificates. But in contrast Let's Encrypt is a non-profit.
Also the controlling party in Italy is practically neo-fascist and Austria is also sliding there again with their Nazi party like AfD in Germany and VB in Belgium getting a huge portion of votes.
I don't see how it is that much better than a US non- profit.
I think the core thing is that you have to know of a bunch of different CA options and switch when necessary or on a compromised CA.
The thing is, the US is already fascist. Austria (current day) would be an improvement.
Also, you know the downfall of Autistici/Inventati - No - check my post history. One of the events that happened is that US owned PIR removed one of the domain names since they own .org. One less US entity, one less point of failure.
Both Italy and Austria are EU member states , fall under the GDPR AND NIS2 and while both government(even under the FPÖ) have their downsides neither has legislation that is even remotely close to what the US even have today (and had for decades) and unlike the US both countries still have a very well working judical system and the ECJ.
So. Yes. While not perfect, their situation is massively better than a US non for profit. Total different league. Not even in the same ballpark.
It is. Most EU countries build on a strong legal system of separation of powers etc. that makes it hard to dismantle democracy with the alacrity MAGA is currently doing it in the USA.
But nevertheless, we're all aware of the rise of fascism in Europe and are extremely worried.
You must be joking.
And you must not have read the relevant US laws.
What risk are you trying to mitigate, specifically?
If it's the CA taking over your site, control over your CA specifically doesn't really give any advantage to an attacker (they would have to hijack traffic and provide a new certificate - nobody will notice if the certificate is from a different CA).
Note that your CA cannot decrypt the exchanges between your server and its clients.