this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
364 points (98.7% liked)

Technology

60044 readers
2871 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
364
Let's Encrypt Announces New-Certificate-Every-6-Days Offering (letsencrypt.org)
submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
108 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

via https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/12/15/0059216/lets-encrypt-announces-new-certificate-every-6-days-offering

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Yes X.509 is broken. If you're a developer and not pinning certs, you're doing it wrong.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

What

[–] [email protected] -5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

What part are you confused about, and are you a developer?

Edit: why was I downvoted for asking this?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm a developer and would appreciate you going into more specifics about which certificates you suggest pinning.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

I'm saying that if you're a developer of software that communicates between two nodes across the internet, you shouldn't rely on X.509 because the common root stores have historically been filled with compromised CAs, which would let someone with that CA decrypt and view the messages you send with TLS.

You should mint your own certs and pin their fingerprints so that your application will only send messages if the fingerprint of the cert on the other end matches your trusted cert.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

OK, so cases where you control both ends of the communication. Thanks for the clarification.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (2 children)

And your software stops functioning after X years due to this.

Don’t do this, this is a bad idea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Technically all certificates are pinned, especially with public CAs, most OS package the latest CA certs which will all go out of style within 10 years or so. You can see this by loading up any old distro or defunct version of windows.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, now imagine pinning certs that change weekly.

My first thought is that old school secure software (like claws-mail) treats a cert change as a minor security incident, asking you to confirm every time. Completely different school of thought.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

You can pin to your own CA. Then it doesn't matter if you want to update your certs frequently.