> And the pinning RFC doesn't sound much better. It makes the client store something about sites they visited, which roughly translates to supercookies.
I don't follow. If the user visits a site for the first time (ever) over a secure connection, they will become much more resilient to MITM for all future connections (including the ones where it updates).
That's a win in my book. At least it is a win from the "hacker" MiTM threat. It won't be as useful against states/governments since there might never be a secure connection ever.
But I'd take a solution NOW that works-ish than a solution maybe never which is flawless. Security in depth and all that jazz. The ultimate solution is some kind of secure DNS infrastructure which delivers information about HTTP certificates (which I believe is in the works also).
I'm not saying it's entirely bad, but it's something some users will want to disable for privacy concerns. The current model works well enough to allow widespread online banking and although this RFC will certainly make it more secure, there are also disadvantages.
I happen to know that Chrome hardcodes a list of EV certificates (or at least I read so a while ago), it could do the same for CAs. Or the browser could ask a central server which CA belongs to a certificate fingerprint. Not that different from OSCP except that it'll probably be run by the browser manufacturer instead of the CA.
> If the user visits a site for the first time (ever) over a secure connection, they will become much more resilient to MITM for all future connections
.. as long as the site never cycles their certificates, and bugs such as Heartbleed never forces them to.
Not a win in my book. In practice, this will be either useless or amount to a tiny nagscreen that users click through with their brains on autopilot.
I don't follow. If the user visits a site for the first time (ever) over a secure connection, they will become much more resilient to MITM for all future connections (including the ones where it updates).
That's a win in my book. At least it is a win from the "hacker" MiTM threat. It won't be as useful against states/governments since there might never be a secure connection ever.
But I'd take a solution NOW that works-ish than a solution maybe never which is flawless. Security in depth and all that jazz. The ultimate solution is some kind of secure DNS infrastructure which delivers information about HTTP certificates (which I believe is in the works also).