disabling HSTS [LWN.net]

disabling HSTS

Posted Apr 19, 2017 3:10 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
In reply to: disabling HSTS by tialaramex
Parent article: Tor exit node operator arrested in Russia (TorServers.net blog)

> An about:config option would presumably be global, so the effect is "set this, and then you can ignore stuff by clicking through it"

The about:config option could be a list of domains to ignore HSTS for, or any number of other things.

> [Pale Moon doesn't trust Let's Encrypt.]

Indeed, it appears Pale Moon doesn't trust Let's Encrypt. The reasons appear to be different than you describe, however; Moonchild's main beef appears to be with the fact that there is no way to get Let's Encrypt to generate a revocation for a fraudulently issued certificate. That sound bad; I hope they fix that, if that's true.

> You won't have noticed because "untrustworthy" for Pale Moon turns out to mean nothing whatsoever, Let's Encrypt certificates still work fine

There's some false information here. Let's Encrypt certificates do, indeed, work fine in Pale Moon, but that is because the Let's Encrypt intermediate certificates are cross-signed by IdenTrust; indeed, viewing a site using Let's Encrypt as its CA results in "Verified by: IdenTrust" in the security information.

However, I can assure you that it is not the case that Pale Moon trusts certificates without a chain of trust ending in a root certificate it trusts. I can also assure you that Pale Moon behaves differently when it doesn't trust a certificate. As with anyone else, I run into self-signed certificate errors and "THE CERTIFICATE EXPIRED YESTERDAY PANIC PANIC OMGWTFBBQ!" inanity on a semi-regular basis. Every time I do, Pale Moon displays a dramatic, full-page, really scary error message with a blood red background. It doesn't do this for trusted certificates, so it's easy to tell when Pale Moon doesn't trust something.

> not that it matters because presumably you'd just click through the errors anyway and press on.

I doubt you really think, given our conversation, that I would blindly click through a certificate error for a site I use regularly and then give that site my login information. Are personal attacks really necessary?

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disabling HSTS

Posted Apr 19, 2017 18:58 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

You can read everything I described about their position on Let's Encrypt in https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon/issues/171

As with any other public CA, Let's Encrypt allows certificate problem reports, through which you could achieve revocation of a fraudulently issued certificate. However a certificate is not "fraudulently issued" just because you don't like who it was issued to or how they're using it, if Steve murders a woman in cold blood, then drives to the airport and boards a plane, neither his driving license nor his passport become "fraudulently issued" just because Steve is now a murderer. This is, by some irony, not so different from the muddled thinking that has the Russians persecuting a Tor node operator for the behaviour of Tor users.

But my main point wasn't this mundane lack of understanding, even though it ought to be enough for you not to want anything to do with somebody developing a web browser, we see the same failure to comprehend from all over. My point was that having decided this is untrustworthy Moonchild decided to do nothing whatsoever about it, so that the effect is exactly the same as if they hadn't made this silly declaration at all. You correctly diagnosed that the result is the certificates are trusted because they were cross-signed. But this isn't the end of the trail at all, stopping there tacitly accepts that these certificates and the CA are fine, but just you're going to make a song and dance.

As far as Pale Moon is concerned the Let's Encrypt CA is just a subCA for Identrust. Assuming that Pale Moon inherits most of the actual machinery of Mozilla's Firefox, this gives them three practical options to choose from. The most drastic is to demand IdenTrust fix this, or if they will not remove IdenTrust from their trust store for issuing subCA certificates to the untrustworthy Let's Encrypt. The next option is to add the cross-signed Let's Encrypt certs as explicitly distrusted in the Pale Moon package, this is how Firefox dealt with problems like DigiNotar early on. Finally the browser can be configured to restrict trust in some other way as a result of making a deal with Let's Encrypt, if they fix whatever troubles you, you'll trust certificates issued after some particular date.

In practice of course Let's Encrypt is ubiquitous at this point, so doing any of these things because of their misunderstanding about what it means for something to be "fraudulently issued" would be grossly disproportionate. But the situation today, in which they profess it is not "trustworthy" but in fact Pale Moon trusts it entirely is a joke.