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Comments: 432 +- Technology: Security Certificate Warnings Don't Work on Sunday July 26 2009, @10:03PM
Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday July 26 2009, @10:03PM
from the for-the-same-reason-most-people-ignore-etruscan dept.
from the for-the-same-reason-most-people-ignore-etruscan dept.
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angry tapir writes "In a laboratory experiment, researchers found that between 55 percent and 100 percent of participants ignored certificate security warnings, depending on which browser they were using (different browsers use different language to warn their users). The researchers first conducted an online survey of more than 400 Web surfers, to learn what they thought about certificate warnings. They then brought 100 people into a lab and studied how they surf the Web. They found that people often had a mixed-up understanding of certificate warnings. For example, many thought they could ignore the messages when visiting a site they trust, but that they should be more wary at less-trustworthy sites."
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'People' don't understand computers (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:'People' don't understand computers (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, it's kind of sad how regular people are expecting us programmers to have our shit together.
Parent
Re:'People' don't understand computers (Score:4, Insightful)
Excuse me? How can I make a user more secure if he is the one that clicks away all my warnings?
Parent
Re:'People' don't understand computers (Score:5, Insightful)
Quote from my human factors instructor of many years ago:
"Any system that depends on the user doing the right thing has already failed."
There should be no warnings. Nothing to click. You simply don't let them see the page and you tell them why. Assume they will work around it and protect them as much as you can anyway.
Most programmers at this point ask, "And should I wipe for them too?"
The correct answer is, "Yes, but ask what brand of paper they prefer and make sure there's an alternative if they forget." Sorry, but THAT'S YOUR JOB AS A PROGRAMMER.
Programs are for PEOPLE, not computers. Computers don't matter. At all. They exist ONLY for PEOPLE. Your job is to take care of the PEOPLE's issues like *they* matter. The computer is secondary, or tertiary.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But more importantly your average user doesn't have a clue what a security certificate is, so why would they care if there's a warning about it?
Re:'People' don't understand computers (Score:5, Funny)
*Checks watch* Any day now...
Parent
Re:'People' don't understand computers (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think it's a problem of not "understanding" computers. Rather that the language used in a lot of cases for the certificates is so verbose, that it confuses people. Remember that when you deal with the average member of the population you're dealing with someone who reads and writes somewhere between a grade 7-10 level. That means that their grasp of language is lower, their understanding is lower, and their frustration level is lower.
If you want to get through to people, you make warnings simpler. Make things simpler, people understand them better, and everyone is happy. Those of us who are in, have been in, the IT field(or associated areas), have a grasp of the English language somewhere around grade 12 to early college, or higher. In other words, this stuff is way beyond what most people can understand.
After all, if you told someone on the street you spent an evening going through a kernel recompile for fun they'd look at like you're an idiot with 3 heads. To them you are; to the rest of us, you're just another geek.
Parent
Re:'People' don't understand computers (Score:5, Insightful)
This. Developers seem convinced that adding more explanation can result in a better educated user. In reality, it just guarantees that fewer people will have read the whole thing. Make informational text as short as possible, but no shorter. IMHO, that's one of the things Apple traditionally nails in their designs that Microsoft flubs. "Save your work?" is a vastly more useful message in a dialog box than something like, "you have clicked a button which is used to close this application. if you close this application without saving changes to your data, it will be lost. You might also want to keep working. Click yes to save your work, no to discard it, or click cancel to continue working."
With Certificate issues, Firefox makes me jump through so many hoops that all my focus is on getting through the hoops, rather than evaluating security. I've never understood how the 'get certificate' button is supposed to make me safer. It seems to just add more steps in an effort to force me to pay attention to the process, but IMO fails to actually provide a security benefit.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
(That's the idea. In reality, you just skip by that screen and bemoan the annoyance.)
Re:'People' don't understand computers (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox makes users jump through hoops for a reason. Once upon a time, webmasters were terrible at keeping websites up to date, and browsers didn't work very hard to make it apparent. If the website is built and operated correctly, users never see a damn thing.
The first hoop is the most important: the page looks like an error, because it is. The proper thing to do is contact the webmaster, or call your helpdesk, and get the cert fixed. Don't continue. The wrong thing to do here is all the rest of the crap where you "pay attention" but intentionally make a stupid decision and "continue anyway." That process does actually give much more information than previous incarnations. If it's self-signed, or expired, or invalid, it'll say so. Not that it matters, because you as a user have no control over whether the certificate is valid or not. These messages should be intended for power users and developers, since they're the only people who might be able to escalate or *fix it*.
The problem as I see it is that web people seem okay with the idea of allowing bad certs. Helpdesk might have previously told users "just click continue anyways, and go on your way." So yea, error dialogs were much easier for users when they could click once and permanently ignore security warnings caused by incompetent IT.
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Re:'People' don't understand computers (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh come on, a self signed certificate is ten times better than no certificate at all. But in the first case, both FF and IE will go berserk with all kind of ways to prevent you from visiting the site. In the second, totally unsecure scenario, the browser won't say a word ..
So again, I have a working site. I decide to add a layer of encryption - and the browser starts warning my users that it's unsafe. Illogical at least .. and here you are defending this idiocy.You must be working for verisign or thawte ..
Parent
sosume isn't a bank (Score:4, Insightful)
"Hi, I'm sosume. I say I'm sosume, and that's all that matters. Please enjoy the random stuff I have to say, and log in with an otherwise pointless username and password if you want to leave comments."
See how it changes when it's just some random dude's website?
Obviously, there's no way for Firefox to tell the difference between a bank's website and some random dude's blog, but it seems to me there must be a middle ground between a tiny little notification saying, "Hey, you should worry about this website!" and an error page saying, "I didn't load this website because of a serious security error! Proceed at your own peril!".
Dan Aris
Parent
Re:'People' don't understand computers (Score:4, Interesting)
No.
Encryption doesn't require 'importance'. It's just good practice. Anything that asks for passwords - slashdot for example - should probably be encrypted.
The only value of certificates is when they *change*. You can't verify who you're talking to the first time around anyway.. a certificate is *not* sufficient verification.
Parent
The reasons for SSL (Score:5, Insightful)
1. connection encryption (i.e. nobody else can read the transmission);
2. site authentication (i.e. you can be certain that this page is actually your bank's website).
See, here's the problem. Many a time I need to put up encryption, but have no need whatsoever for authentication (sending data like passwords or whatever, but not that critical to be a target of somebody setting up a bigus copy). Firefox says "whatever", and proceeds to complain about 2. above not being satisfied. And complain loud!
Something's wrong in this image. I think there should be 2 classes of SSL certs - "encryption-only" and "full-mode", or whatever they'd be called. the "encryption-only" cert could allow you to use SSL without warnings; the "full-mode" cert wouldn't. The icon or other graphical method of identifying "trusted sites" could even be completely different for both modes.
Parent
Re:'People' don't understand computers (Score:5, Insightful)
Then why don't we fix that and solve or prevent a whole host of other problems by doing so?
There's something seriously pathological about seeing this as a situation to be accommodated rather than a disease state to be remedied.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Page maybe evil! There be dragons, do not go there!"
Better?
It does not change a thing. People do not read that shit. Even if they do, what's lacking is that we do not (and often cannot) offer them an alternative or solution. We don't tell them "instead, do this and you can still accomplish what you wanted to do". So the obvious response is "hmm... it said maybe. Ok, hopefully it won't be that bad".
Because they don't see any alternative. Their choice is only to take the (possible) risk or simply not do what
Bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead you just screan loudlier while hold them by the shoulder. That will not help, it will only do two things 1) search for a web browser which do not scream at them 2) ignore even more the cert warning by going take a coffee and click it away anyway when they come back.
Parent
I would probably do the same thing (Score:5, Insightful)
I blame firefox's big scary error page that comes up every time a page uses a self-signed certificate. I've gotten so good at ignoring that, I probably wouldn't notice if a page said "the certificate doesn't match" instead of "the certificate is self-signed."
Mozilla isn't doing anybody any favors with their heightened paranoia.
Re:I would probably do the same thing (Score:5, Insightful)
mozilla didn't start this, their ancestor Netscape did. they're the ones who tried to bootstrap and cash-in on a PKI market by creating a bogus scarcity (browser recognised Certificate Authorities) on an infinite supply (Certificates), and deliberately blurred the distinction between encryption (which is all that many or even most sites need, and for which self-signed certs are good enough) and authentication (which very few sites need, banks and so on for which the ONLY real solution is certs signed by government agencies with responsibility for banks in each country, not some private company).
every mainstream browser since then has continued the trend.
Parent
Re:I would probably do the same thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Encryption is useless if you don't know who is at the other end. SSL and TLS are designed to stop man-in-the-middle attacks, and you cannot do that without trusted authentication.
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Re:I would probably do the same thing (Score:5, Insightful)
I work on a lab intranet. Almost every switch and ILOM uses an https GUI for management. I 100% don't care about man in the middle attacks, but I do care about the 4 clicks (now 2 with a little tweaking) that Firefox makes me jump through every time I open up a new console to do work. It's ridiculous and the 'chicken little' scenario just desensitizes users.
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Re:I would probably do the same thing (Score:4, Informative)
You know you can import the certificates manually. And if you carry them by hand instead of over the network, it really is more secure than the CA solution. The only way you should have extra clicks every time is if you're changing the certificate frequently. Or the guy running the MITM attack on you is changing his certificate frequently...
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Re:I would probably do the same thing (Score:5, Informative)
authentication (which very few sites need
When I log into $FORUM, how do I make sure that I am giving my password to $FORUM and not to someone who has intercepted my Internet connection?
You don't. Unless you call up $FORUM_OWNER at a verified number (not off the domain)---which means you first have to investigate and verify who the owner is---and get them to verify their certificate fingerprint. You do that every time you log in somewhere? I didn't think so.
The PKI "authorities" do no checking. Anyone with a few hundred bucks can get a "valid" cert, so if you're relying on that ...
banks and so on
Every time you shop online, you deal with banks.
No, you deal with merchants. Merchants deal with a chain of other people, who may or may not be banks. Credit card companies are not, but your card may be managed through one.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, self-signed certificates shouldn't be trusted. Not on a public website.
On an intranet, they're acceptable, but you should be adding your own server as a CA on every client machines, so that people don't get the warning. Even then, hell, pay and get a certificate from one of the big CAs and be done with it. Saves hassle, and it's cheap.
That big scary page that Firefox shows you is EXACTLY what every browser should show you. Self-signed certificates are NOT OKAY for production/public use. Encryption is mo
No shit (Score:5, Interesting)
Do we really need a lab study to tell us this? Even the article admits that we've known for decades now that users will happily accept a broken cert. There was a case where the Mozilla people received a complaint from a security researcher saying their certificate checking was broken because he was connecting to a known trusted website and her certificate wasn't broken, so it must be Mozilla's fault - they concluded that it was man-in-the-middle attack and she later apologized. If a security researcher can't even tell, how are my parents supposed to?
How about this for a solution? Instead of a "Privacy Shield" you have a "Security Shield".. when you press the Security Shield button you enter Lock Down Mode and your web browser will refuse to display pages that are not retrieved via TLS. You could also enable some extra paranoia settings.. turn off plugins, Flash, etc. When you've finished your banking, or whatever, you press the Security Shield button again and now you can go back to Facebook.
Re:No shit (Score:4, Funny)
Challenge/response authentication using a credit card number and PIN as the encryption key. Let the bank issue the challenge, have the e-commerce site pass that right on to the browser. Let the browser do the encryption, and pass it all back to the bank via the site.
Parent
That's because security warnings are stupid. (Score:5, Interesting)
The only difference between a self signed certificate and one that is signed by a CA is that someone wrote a check for the CA signed cert. No CA does any verification that the person writing that check is who they say they are, has any rights to that domain, or anything else, they only check to see if they already have a signed certificate. I've personally bought Verisign certificates for other people, without any proof that I'm in any way authorized to do so, let alone proving who I actually am. They mean absolutely nothing.
The only kind of certificate warning is one which indicates that a certificate is not what it's supposed to be. However, since there's still no central way to check a certificate(even a signed one) the only way to do that is to compare it with what you had before, which means the only viable certificate warning is one indicating a certificate has changed.
When browsers panic over things that aren't worth panicking over (most folks will have encountered a perfectly legitimate self signed cert at some point in their time on the web, is it any wonder they just bypass the error.
Certs never guarantee who you're talking to, they only provide encrypted communication.
But is this person the same as that person? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, certificates do guarentee that the person you are talking to is the same as the time the certificate was first issued.
So how do you know that the person to whom you are talking using a given URL is the same person to whom, say, a software reviewer was talking when he downloaded a given release?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I do agree with most of the posters here though, there's no reason that they can't change that ignorant warning to something a bit more user friendly. Users obviously don't care what it says.
Mac (Score:3, Insightful)
I am reasonable computer-savvy but I also don't understand these messages most of the time. I then use the 'I have a Mac, I am invincible' attitude, which is dangerous of course. But I just want to view that website!
If it wouldn't pop up everywhere it shouldn't (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that those things are just a nuisance for a lot of things. It just pops up randomly because a developer forgot to test the latest update or didn't install the new certificate on all the frontends. Then you have the 'intermediate' CA's where if the intermediate issuer isn't in the browser CA's or the browser doesn't support intermediates or wildcard certificates it gives you another warning. Or somebody let the certificate expire or didn't get it signed by a well-known CA (usually the less-professional sites that are self-signing). Then if your ISP isn't honest (which apparently 99% of them these days aren't) with their DNS and you go to https://wrongname.com/ [wrongname.com] it will give you the https version of their ad page on the other domain which of course gives a big warning.
I have seen warnings on important sites like Wells Fargo and Bank of America and there are permanent warnings on some other sites that I use frequently that are either self-signed or expired. I usually verify them and it's not my system that's been hijacked so I am ignoring them largely as well.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There's so much certificate misuse. A typical mistake is getting a cert for, say, "*.slashdot.org", and then serving it for "slashdot.org". That will cause a reject. Then there are U.S. Government certificate authorities, too many of them. Try, for example, USMC Doctrine Division [usmc.mil]. The CA is "DOD CA-13". DoD alone has root CAs "CA-5", through "CA-18", and not all browsers know all of them.
This is a headache for SiteTruth [sitetruth.com], which uses certificates as a indication of web site validity and a source of bus
Because... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just wording it differently like 'If you are accessing what appears to be a trusted website, and you are recieving this warning, you should not visit it as it could be a nasty security risk. Try again later." Rather than "Warning: Security certificate is not valid... [etc etc..]". This makes a huge difference.
WOT is more to the point: "This website is dangerous" and the page is locked out until you navigate away or click on a very clear "Ignore this warning and proceed".
Big surprise! (Score:5, Insightful)
The situation isn't helped by the fact that the overwhelming majority of invalid certs, in my experience, are just from random sites which you find with a Google search, and those sites for some reason have https instead of http as their search result. You click, and oh shock, the administrator hasn't updated his cert in ages, because nobody cares. After endless warnings about this, even I have stopped caring. It's almost a Pavlovian conditioning to see that warning and say "Yeah, whatever."
It's even worse now. Back in the day, you could dismiss these mostly spurious warnings with one click. These days, Firefox makes you go through an utterly obnoxious process of acknowledging the warning, then manually adding the certificate, then approving it. All because I needed to see some forum where people were discussing some problem I needed to solve. I am so tired of having to go through this that I just sigh and back away from the site and try to find another one that won't make me do this. I am not shocked that users just click whatever it takes to make the warnings go away.
With untrustworthy CA's, who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Verisign is untrustworthy, so why should I care if a certificate is signed or not?
Signed certificates are a complete racket: If you don't pay us then when your users show up they will get a giant warning shown in their face, telling them not to trust you. You wouldn't want that would you? Nope, don't care who you are, what you do, or why. $100 bucks please.
Not a big surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
You could have a big pop up box that says "Clicking here will empty your bank account, steal your car, rape your women and children, and cancel your NASCAR season pass on your TiVo" and John Q Public will still click on it.
Most of the non-techies and a lot of techies are sick of "The Browser/OS who cried wolf".
Failed logic, again (Score:4, Interesting)
I get certificate warnings for internal sites, inside the firewall, without having accessed anything external. Yes, our CA people and developers are morons. No, let me state that more clearly. They are offshored, overpaid by a factor of five, patent leather morons. And they all talk too fast, fail to deliver a statement of work, and fail to deliver even what they say they will, in writing, before witnesses. But I digress.
Certificate warnings are relatively pointless, because they point out a technical flaw without distiguishing between bookeeping flaws, expired or poorly minted certificates due to simple incompetence, private certificates that serve the purpose, and actual explotations.
Many of our certificates at work would raise warnings, and do when I indulge in testing, but the sites are application-specific. A browser never needs to access these, and doesn't unless I'm verifying connectivity. Otherwise, the firewalls and application rules kick in and discourage an attacker by either blocking their IP or delaying response and slowing the attack to a crawl.
I get these warnings pretty regularly on public sites, and generally ignore them. But anything I was linked to, or referred, or a URL I am not entirely sure of, I either close the session and start over, or try it on my phone.
So far, my phone has shrugged off some clever but Windows-specific attacks. Always fun to revel in the agony of others.
This was never the purpose (Score:3, Insightful)
There are actually many pieces of UX that fall into this camp, where the UX makes little sense until you understand the various lawsuits that led to it. For instance, did you ever wonder why the "Pictures" item in the Windows start menu doesn't take you to the photo gallery - which is what something like 95% of users expect?
Unfortunately, over time we can expect this to increase instead of decrease.
SnooPING AS usual, I see (Score:4, Interesting)
Ignore certificate warnings if you're not planning to give the site any important information (e.g. a password). Otherwise, don't.
So you don't want to send passwords over an HTTPS connection with a self-signed certificate. I take it you don't want to send passwords over an HTTP connection either, as HTTP is even easier to snoop than self-signed HTTPS. Should everybody who runs a forum or a wiki pay $$$ per year for a CA-signed certificate?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, they could use OpenID or something.
Not that I do, because OpenID is a huge hassle to deal with, but you could.
Re:Not many people have the money... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Not many people have the money... (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone willing to screw lots of people, each out of thousands of dollars, is also willing to game the CA system with stolen credit cards.
It is all about trust. If you can't trust the signing authority, how can you trust the signer?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Legitimate sites will not do this" == lie. Seriously guys, fucking grow up. The number of changes I have had to make to firefox in code (not about:config, code) to disable autocomplete prevention, self-signed certs, etc...it's getting frustrating.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. My bank can spring for a paid certificate
Sure they can! Because those asswipes have a ton of fucking taxpayer money!
You are correct. The cert. method in FF3 sucks big time.
Re:Maybe Firefox will Chill Out now (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, no, they'd better not be doing that. A certificate authority (CA), in order to be recognized by any of the major browser vendors, is required to contact the people responsible for a domain before issuing a cert for that domain. Normally, the CA does this by sending email to the contact addresses in the domain's whois record. Unless one of those contacts clicks a link or takes some other action to confirm that the person is authorized to obtain a cert on the domain's behalf, the CA is not allowed to issue the cert. Some CAs will also allow certified letters from the registrar if your whois contact info is stale, but that's likely to be an even bigger hoop.
If you know of a CA that is violating this policy and is just issuing a cert if the credit card clears, please contact every browser vendor out there, and that CA will immediately cease to be a recognized CA.
Parent
Re:Maybe Firefox will Chill Out now (Score:5, Informative)
Standard certs do nothing to establish identity. They merely establish that the site is not being spoofed. Thus, the purpose of the whois email verification is not to prevent illegitimate sites from getting certs. The purpose of the whois email verification is to ensure that I can't get a cert for www.bankofamerica.com, hack an ISP's DNS server to redirect their traffic to my site, and pose as Bank of America. For those purposes, it is sufficient to merely require that the domain owners confirm via email that the request was authorized.
If you want to confirm that a domain owner is in any way anything approaching a legitimate business, that's what an EV cert is for. Only an EV cert establishes identity in any way.
Parent
Re:Maybe Firefox will Chill Out now (Score:5, Interesting)
Get a free certificate, then. http://www.startssl.com/ [startssl.com] generates basic certificates at no charge. It works in most major browsers, and IE support is expected in the near future. Now that startssl exists, there's really no excuse for self-signed certs even inside a corporate firewall, much less for a real public website.
Free, schmee, that is not the problem at all. Why in hell should I trust someone ELSE to verify my ownership of a domain name on MY internal network? The real problem is everything using their own damn CA lists, making it impossible for us to easily publish internal CA certs. Subversion has one, Windows has one, OS X has one, Gnome probably has one, Firefox has one, Java has one, SSH does NOT have one, etc, etc, etc.
Why aren't CA's delegated just like DNS is? I own all of foobar.net, so grant me an intermediate CA responsible for only *.foobar.net and let me verify & issue certs for my own fraking domain names (internal or NOT!). It is much easier to chain an intermediate cert to the server than add a new internal CA to the clients. Obviously, distributing trust to the rightful owners cuts the CA roots out of their silly trust monopolies.
The determination of who owns a domain name TWICE, for registration & certification is a straight up failure. Own the domain, you should own the CA authority, stop owning it, your cert chain is revoked.
Parent
Re:Maybe Firefox will Chill Out now (Score:5, Informative)
Right now, the only suitable infrastructure for such delegation is DNS. And it's horribly insecure for such things.
Fortunately, it'll become possible with DNSSEC. Indeed, there are groups working on certificate delegation via DNS.
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F10467%2F33214%2F01565268.pdf%3Farnumber%3D1565268&authDecision=-203 [ieee.org]
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Re:Maybe Firefox will Chill Out now (Score:4, Insightful)
A company which is running their own CA for internal use should have the means to install that CA on each workstation -- thus, no warning, and as a bonus, no possibility of MITMs inside their network.
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