Re: [tor-talk] Ordering a .onion EV certificate from Digitcert

[Ben Tasker <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> For what use exactly? ie why people should want a TLS certificate for a
> .onion, which by definition is something not tied to an official
> "domain", like anything that has no other choice than using self-signed
> certificates?

The benefit of a publicly signed certificate over a snake-oil certificate
is obvious,
so I guess you're asking why a hidden service would want TLS?

There are a bunch of potential reasons an operator _might_ find it
desirable,
one of which you've alluded to in that thread.

- E2E encryption if the HS' tor client is running on a different box to the
service
- Additional confirmation that you're talking to the hidden service you
expected to
- An additional layer of encryption if that provided by Tor is ever found
inadequate

But as time goes by, there's an additional reason - availability of
features.

Mozilla announced a while back that certain features were going to be gated
on
https availability - i.e. a HTTP only onion won't be able to benefit from
them.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/04/30/deprecating-non-secure-http/

Personally, I think it's a bad idea, as (depending on the feature) it's
effectively
punishing the user for a decision taken by a website they have no control
over. But
it does mean in the future there may potentially be thinks a HS operator
want's to
take advantage of and can't.



> I personally think the CA mechanism is broken, so letsencrypt would be
the better
> choice of the bad ones.

The problem is, letsencrypt doesn't help with a lot of the issues I see
coming from
the broken CA structure. Your personal data has less exposure (because
you're
not giving it to them), but there's still no protection against a
broken/compromised
CA issuing a certificate for your domain, for example.

Worse, because letsencrypt insist on that 90 day renewal, things that could
help defend
against that scenario (like key pinning) aren't really an option because
the windows
are too tight. There are ways around that (like not regenerating keys) but
it potentially
opens you up to other things.

Letsencrypt addresses some of the issues with the CA model, but IMO they've
also
managed to effectively worsen some of the issues I'm more concerned about.







On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 9:24 PM, Aymeric Vitte <vitteaymeric@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> For what use exactly? ie why people should want a TLS certificate for a
> .onion, which by definition is something not tied to an official
> "domain", like anything that has no other choice than using self-signed
> certificates?
>
> Something can be done to verify that someone owns the .onion "domain"
> and probably we should study this (for letsencrypt for example) and get
> rid of this notion of "domain" which is obsolete, please take a look at
> this thread
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2015OctDec/0205.html
> (follow the previous posts if you have time, this addresses the very
> same problematic, including letsencrypt), still not convincingly
> answered (despite of the fact that the W3C obviously does not follow its
> security policy for WebRTC), since people there seem to find a kind of
> funny the Tor protocol but, happier for the planet, succeeded to secure
> it with a fb .onion certificate.
>
> Le 15/12/2015 17:09, Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) - lists a Ãcrit :
> > Hello,
> >
> > we asked on Twitter to Digicert to provide a quick guide on how order an
> > x509v3 certificate for TLS for a .onion, they've just published this
> > small guide:
> > https://blog.digicert.com/ordering-a-onion-certificate-from-digicert/
> >
> > Hopefully other CA will follow and at a certain point letsencrypt too.
> >
>
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Ben Tasker
https://www.bentasker.co.uk
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