SSL revisited(varnish-cache.org) |
SSL revisited(varnish-cache.org) |
- "you don't want to bog down your countrys civil defence agency with SSL/TLS protocol negotiations if their website is being deluged by people trying to survive a natural disaster"
- "there are people who do not have a right to privacy"
- "SSL Everywhere will force institutions to either block any internet connectivity or impose Man-in-The-Middle proxies"
- "SSL Everywhere [gives privacy] to the actors I think deserve it the least"
- "shady behaviour of big transnational, and therefore law-less, companies have been exposed by security researchers (or just interested lay-people) who ran tcpdump"
- "SSL Everywhere puts all traffic in the shade"
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My opinion:
Without TLS, the Internet is either read-only or has reasonably high security risk.
I also noticed varnish-cache.org was served to me over TLS.
MITM proxies are already how many organizations handle web filtering. (aka "transparent proxies") TLS just necessitates that the organization have some control over the device being MITM'd to do so. (to install their cert)
Either all MiTM needs to be outlawed (with actual laws) or protocols need to recognize that laws mandate MiTM some places, and accommodate that with minimal loss of security and privacy.
The current weapons race just makes things more and more broken.
And I fundamentally disagree with the premise that there are people who do not deserve privacy. I can not think of a single person I would wish complete exposure of their lives upon.
If "bad" people outnumber "good" people in your world view, then yes, it's entirely reasonable to deny everyone privacy.
What are the institutions that are hell-bent on listening to everyone's traffic? China government? OK, serve them non-sensitive content via plain HTTP; they'll filter or alter it to their liking. Possibly you're fine with this. NSA? Well, maybe something can and should be done to it that we can't do to the China government?
(Not to self: when planning a deployment, consider other options before turning to Varnish cache.)
If TLS overhead is the last straw that brings down a web site, the site's infrastructure isn't suitable for delivering safety-critical information.
Have your forgotten (or maybe never seen ?) CNN's traffic graph from 9/11 ?
Experience so far is that emergency services web-pages tend to die the instant they are most needed. Addint TLS will just make that happen even more.
I'll start by saying I don't agree that some people don't deserve privacy. I just can't get behind that in literally any form. More and more computers and what we store on them are an extension of our minds. By this logic you are more or less reading my thoughts by knowing what I doing online (I could write a whole paper on this).
That said kudos to the author of varnish for actually coming out and explaining why he feels this way. Too often there is no insight into why something was done a certain why (or why it wasn't done at all) and anything that sheds light on that is a good in my book. I understand and agree with where he is coming from in relation to it adding attack surface, complicating the code, and tying him up from working on other things. Those are all legit reasons coupled with the fact that this you can just use something like HAProxy or Pound in front of varnish.
For me nginx caching is good enough for my personal use and at work we are not to the point that using varnish would provide big enough gains to offset the time to implement it (we are SSL-only). That said I will continue to keep my eye on varnish because I have used it before and quite liked it.
If you want to change that, vote.
> The next big issue is that there are people who do not have a right to privacy. In many countries this includes children, prisoners, stock-traders, flight-controllers, first responders and so on.
and a comment in this thread
> And I fundamentally disagree with the premise that there are people who do not deserve privacy. I can not think of a single person I would wish complete exposure of their lives upon. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9454402)
caused me to misinterpret that. Do not have a right != Do not deserve. I am very sorry that I implied something that is not true. I am editing my original post to clarify this.
> But one of the biggest problem I have with SSL Everywhere is that it gives privacy to the actors I think deserve it the least.
Some deserve privacy more than others? How does that work?
Nginx' caching is good enough that it's not worth the pain of trying to implement some wacky setup just to use Varnish.
The response times were virtually identical, and the load on the box was significantly lower with Nginx over varnish, so the simplicity was the deciding factor.
We've settled on Nginx for a few of our use cases (to good reception), but there are other use cases we're still evaluating.
But if you're actually running Varnish the way he'd like you to, chances are something isn't quite right with your architecture. Poul-Henning has strong opinions on everything from virtual memory to life on Mars and I really don't need that stuff to be part of my web stack.
A little personal maturity to match the product maturity would help both advance.
Varnish grew legs as part of saving the clusterfuck that is WordPress. Custom cache rules up a layer from a broken old code base is AWESOME. Maybe also a red flag.
Getting a read on where the product is headed -- by being aware of corporate motives or by reading developer's ranty blog posts -- can be part of the strategy. Percival, Torvalds, Fried -- I kinda know what to expect from them moving forward.
This guy is playing a similar game but not doing it right.
The "interesting" part comes from the fact that a socket may read when you want it to write and vice versa: the underlying protocol is more complex than just pushing bytes. This means that the socket needs to be able to read and write when you want to do one of those operations. There is also fragmentation of your data. You say "send this 8 KB buffer", yet it gets sent in pieces (cipher blocks?), which can lead to some interesting issues (my server was for video streaming, and sending an incomplete frame resulted in artifacts). I solved some of this by enabling SSL_MODE_ENABLE_PARTIAL_WRITE (don't block until everything is sent, just tell me what succeeded).
What I'm trying to say is that not enabling SSL because its code is a mess is an example of "the enemy of good is perfect". While Varnish refuses to add SSL support, nginx has it. That's why I use nginx and not Varnish.
On the other hand, I don't want China to bog down some contry's civil defence (or any other website) by DDOSing it, injecting JS into unencrypted baidu traffic. Which one is causing more problems right now?
NSA could, in theory, be reigned in by the government, but nobody in the world has the power to stop the transnational companies deconstruction of everybodys indentities.
For instance, I have never agreed to FaceBook's terms and conditions, but they track me, like everybody else.
But no, Varnish is the optimal point for doing encryption, and placing anything on its front is contrary to any reason somebody would have to use it.
If you use Varnish, it's almost certainly sitting at the best point for doing TLS termination.
If you can't allow SSL on your network, you can't allow use of Google and about 2000 sites which browsers will not even try opening via HTTP:
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/n...
Jail libraries and magic-cookie-hunting hackers have an option of installing their own CA certificate. This is supported by all browsers. It's not hard, even Lenovo malware can do it.
The fact that you might not use those sites doesn't mean that we who deliver tools for them can just ignore them, or even worse, impose our political agenda on them.
You can do HTTPS with Varnish if you want to, but you'll have to do it with the architecturally and security-wise most sensible configuration: With a SSL terminating proxy in front of Varnish.
And again: Talk to your legislators about peoples right to privacy, I'm just pointing out that such laws exist, I'm not writing them (or for that matter agreeing with them.)
While the long tail of sites isn't on HTTPS yet, the most popular ones are HTTPS-only already, and the result is that in Chrome HTTPS sites are browsed more often than HTTP sites:
I hope to update it soon to support ECDSA keys in addition to RSA. (This wasn't previously possible, but I think it's now possible with OpenSSL 1.0.2.)
The none cypher provided this without encryption, but it's long been deprecated.
There are other, far better authentication methods for things like emergency services, and I'd rather have unauthenticated information, than no information at all anyway.
You also don't need authentication to stop ISP's being stupid, for that Integrity is all you need.
If your site runs fine, in all situations you care about, without FOO, you would be pretty lame if you increased its complexity with FOO nonetheless, for any value of FOO.
That is more or less exactly the central argument of the piece I wrote.
The KISS principle dictate that I do not add SSL/TLS to Varnish, because it would just increase complexity without any comparable net increase in benefits.
Yes, it's probably (slightly) more work to configure a SSL-terminating proxy and varnish, but that is the maximal benefit you can hope to obtain if I implement SSL/TLS.
On the other hand, having SSL termination in a clearly defined separate layer gives you at least the following benefits:
You can change implementation in one layer without affecting the other.
You can scale one layer separate from the other.
You can have different administrator access in one layer than the other.
You can scale the SSL layer for CPU and the Varnish layer for RAM.
You can have multiple independent implementations of your SSL termination, thereby vastly increasing the chances that you don't have to shut down next time some SSL library breaks.
&c &c &c
Any eta on v4.1 with PROXY support? I didn't find much when looking quickly (and from a phone)
Unquestionably, yes.
TLS adds quite a bit of memory overhead, it increases the network bandwidth due to padding, and if your CPU is eqipped with AES extensions (modern ones) then you still do compression usually.
it can be difficult to cache certain things with TLS also- since you can't do transparent caching. (although this is more a problem for those running squid proxies at work on a stretched out line).
TLS is certainly an overhead and it's not required in cases where I'm checking a bulletin about earthquakes.
How does TLS increase disk usage?
HSTS/HPKP headers could be stripped by proxy but preloaded public key list probably will require custom browser build.
I 100% agree with the view that caching and tls termination/load balancing are two different tasks, suited to two different tools.
The stated reason for this approach is keeping the existing excellent solution, from becoming worse without any real gain.
Yes the author has stated views about the use of tls "everywhere" - specifically because varnish doesn't handle tls, those opinions don't affect the tool at all.
Edit: s/told/tls/ damn you autocorrect!
Customers are trying to solve a pretty basic, common problem here. I don't see how a ranty, opinionated position paper moves anyone closer to the finish line.
All it did was further influence my opinion of where Varnish would likely be in five years. While I appreciate the candor I'm not sure he did himself any favors.
What I did WRT moving people closer to the finish line was to implement the PROXY protocol, so that using a(ny) preexisting and well-tested SSL-termination solution works seamlessly with Varnish.
IMO, that is a far superior solution to adding a lot of security critical code to Varnish which, at the end of that huge effort, doesn't work any better.
As I wrote in my piece: "the world really don't need another piece of code that does an half-assed job at cryptography"
And doing a full-assed job only makes sense if you have the resources, competence (important with crypto!) and the result makes a positive contribution, one way or another, which offsets the cost of its production.
Nobody has yet been able to point out what the positive contribution would be, compared to a solution where SSL termination is its own layer.
Do you know something about that which I don't ?
If so, please share...
They're not mentioned one single time in the US or the Danish Constitutions, yet, both countries they more or less run government now.
UN's human rights don't mention them either.
Companies have no claim to human rights, like privacy, because they are not humans.
And if you think all humans, no matter what, should have a universal, unabbridgable right to privacy: Vote in your elections, and if nobody is worthy of your vote, get yourself elected instead.
But right now there are fully valid laws that says certain classes of humans do not get privacy, and the government which enacted those laws are legit, elected and have every right to enforce their laws.
I don't think deserving privacy has a scale. I understand your "deserve least" as "I'd rather they didn't have privacy". Feel free to correct me.
If you're an employee you have to put the company CERT on your smartphone ?
How does that improve your security ?
Obviously it's not perfect, but being not perfect is no excuse for refusing to use what we've got right now. And it's not a choice of unauthenticated information or no information, it's a choice between authenticated information and possibly wrong information.
Trusting ISPs to have integrity is in my opinion much more absurd than trusting CA's. CA's have a financial motivation to keep their CA status which browsers can revoke. ISPs have nobody keeping them in line.
Really ?
How many of the root-certs that are in your browser by default do you actually trust ?
What objective evidence is there, that any of them can be trusted ?
You could have stopped there. My feeling is that you should have.
But the rant part of your post? Evoking HeartBleed and "I told you so" and Snowden and digs on BSD and "big transnational, and therefore law-less, companies." Well, that makes you look a little wacky.
By doing this you attracted unnecessary attention to yourself (perhaps the point) but also generated no positive goodwill for the product. Worse, it made me question the motivations behind the technology decision.
It's not a good tech post and it's not a good marketing post.
As I stated, there are people who do this sort of thing well. Your post is an example of not doing it well.
Your interpretation of this is ridiculous.
You may as well dismiss Linux because the kernel doesn't include an ANSI SQL compliant database and runtime environment for perl, ruby, python and php.
There is immense value in having several small, specialised tools that can be used together to form a solution.
It's also easier to sell someone on your component strategy when you don't trash every possible piece that could plug in to the hole you've left -- from operating systems and open source crypto packages to government agencies and transnational corporations. But that little observation seems to be getting lost in the noise here.
Let me know if you ever want to have a fact-based discussion, in the meantime, don't get cold up there, on your high horse.
I gave a talk called "NSA Operation Orchestra" some time ago, I recommend you watch it, it might give you something to think about.
Needless to say, I don't agree.