The web needs encrypting, but that's not the whole story

There's been a lot of talk about 'encrypting the web' recently, so I decided to post about it myself. In this post I'll explain the problem, the solution, and why the solution may cause more problems than it solves.

The problem itself has actually been around since the web was designed, but it hasn't really been a huge problem until recently. Let's consider a legitimate origin server that serves HTML files about animals, such as bunnies.html. Since it doesn't have anything to hide (who'd want to steal pictures of bunnies, anyway?), it serves these files over regular HTTP, not HTTPS.

Suppose that our animal website becomes hugely popular overnight, and has thousands of users browsing it per hour. Let's also suppose that someone has managed to gain control of the network that connects our origin server's network to the wider internet. Since this someone is smart, rather than sending a DOS attack or a ton of spam from the compromised network, rather they fiddle about with the responses that our origin server is sending to, turning our unsuspecting users' browsers into the source of a massive DDOS attack or worse! A prime example of this was the attack on GitHub last year.

If a website's communications aren't encrypted, it allows anyone to inspect and tamper with both requests and responses. You can't even guarantee that you're connecting to the server you think you are and not a cleverly designed imitation!

HTTPS solves all of these problems. It encrypts communications between the client and server, preventing messages from being inspected or tampered with. It also verifies the identity of the server, which is why you need a certificate in order to serve things over HTTPS.

The other side

At the beginning of this post, I said that HTTPS isn't the whole story. Obviously it solves the problem at hand, right? Yes it does, but it also brings to other issues to the table: complicating the setup process, and breaking links. The second of these problems is easy - we can just setup automatic redirects that send you to the HTTPS version of a site.

The first problem is decidedly more difficult to solve. HTTPS is difficult to set up, and if it becomes the default, it could reduce the accessibility of setting up and running your own website. Thankfully it isn't the required yet.

At the moment, nobody has a complete solution to this issue. Letsencrypt is a new brilliant service that makes obtaining SSL certificates easy, provided that you can either fiddle with your web server config, or are willing to let a script do it for you, but it doesn't help you set it up correctly (another excellent read).

The other slightly related issue is that users often mistake 'HTTPS' to mean secure. While this is true of the communications between their computer and the server, it doesn't stop the server from setting the root password to 1234 and storing passwords in plain text.

If you're still here, thank you for reading! Hopefully you now understand some of the issues surrounding web security at the moment. Please post a comment down below if you have anything to say (-:

Sources and further reading

• https://thenanfang.com/why-baidu-was-hijacked-to-attack-github/
• An introduction to javascript based DDOS by Cloudflare
• I used Ascidia by Frimkron to render the diagram above.