On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 12:55 PM, George Kadianakis desnacked@riseup.net wrote:
plans for any Tor modifications we want to do (for example, trusting self-signed certs signed by the HS identity key seem like a generally good idea).
If the HS pubkey and the onion CN were both in the cert, and signed over by that same key all corresponding to the url the TBB is currently attempting to validate, that would seem fine to me. No interaction with the controller (which may not even be accessible [1]) needed to get the HS descriptor (pubkey). Security is limited to 80-bits, or the future wider proposal. It's also a TBB specific extension. All other browsers pointed at socks5 somewhere will still rightly fail, unless adopted upstream (which MSIE won't do) or via standards. Note that this is not 'turning off the warnings for all .onion', it's recognizing that attestation of the HS key is sufficient to show ownership of that service. Whereas under various attacks a traditional selfsigned cert is not.
M. Finkel: habit, where we're conditioning the younger generation to click-through,
It's suggested the right training is to teach the contexts in which they should care... banking, email, accounts, etc... and then to in fact just click through (everyday browsing) unless they're under a context where they actually care. Even though you have the helmet, you train and care wear a helmet for racing, not walking. The mandantory warnings are there for people who care about their context, not those who don't. My beef is that it requires more than one click in FF to get through.
Grandma panics and freezes because that's the response you trained her to give. Grandma also didn't grow up with a padlock icon on her iphone, she had rotary landline. So forget about the grandma argument ok, that'll be gone in a generation, till then it's cryptos who must give elder care.
Question 2: What if Joe and Jane publish a CA or <blah>? They are atypical and all users will still received a certificate validation error when they try connecting to the cluster because the CA isn't...trusted.
Again, you cannot break this by ignoring all of .onion. If they want to be their own CA and give a root to their users, that's their right and expectation of browser standards. It's precisely the in house CA model commonly used in corporate internals and other priviledged or separate cases. It's their choice to opt in and supply the above HS pubkey exception cert for bypass by TBB. Not TBB to remove capabilities from them.
the hidden service's key can simply sign the CA cert or an intermidiate
Multiple services would need to include multiple HS keys and sigs in the CA cert... it's literally a sizable mess and likely not worth it when you can singly opt in or go private CA or buy digicert on your own.
I'm considering the feasibility of delegating verification to tor over the control port
See [1] above.