On 12/29/2015 01:16 PM, bernard wrote:
On 29/12/2015 19:38, Jesse V wrote:
A few hidden services have added an HTTPS cert but I think that's mostly for a publicity stunt than anything else.
(I am not commenting on the technical necessity of a cert.)
No, I think the point that was made at today's talk (and correct me if I got it wrong) was that if I am the operator of, for example, www.bigclearwebwebsite.com (who, by default of big known to the Internet, I am not worried about the anonymity of my site or those who operate it).
I want to create a www.bigclearwebwebsite.onion site (which of course would be more like www.xhsjeflflajdfyeysksldpfiejcc.onion), I can do this by getting a HTTPS cert for my .onion address.
The objective of it (from a users point of view) would be the tieing the identity of the *clear web* site and the *.onion site* together to give the user some trust that bigclearwebwebsite.onion is in fact the same as the .com site.
(Replace bigclearwebwebsite. with DuckDuckGo, Facebook, etc)
True. But I don't see that it helps much for onion sites that aren't tied to well-known clearweb sites. Spoofers could also get HTTPS certs. And users couldn't tell them apart.
I've been playing with GnuPG-signed pages, with the public key available from multiple independent sources. But of course, it's a bit much to expect users to verify signatures.