GetYourCensorOn
http://getyourcensoron.com/

Stop American Censorship
http://americancensorship.org/

For what a bunch of folks involved in engineering the Internet think, see..

An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress
December 15, 2011 | By Parker Higgins and Peter Eckersley
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-warn-against-sopa-and-pipa

For some further commentary, see the below (this is just some highlights, you don’t have to look far to find a bunch more out there)..

Some Data On How Much The Big Media Firms Are Donating To SOPA/PIPA Sponsors
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111203/00494716961/some-data-how-much-big-media-firms-are-donating-to-sopapipa-sponsors.shtml

YouTube rejects UMG demand - Megaupload Mega Song returns
http://www.nnsquad.org/archives/nnsquad/msg06203.html

SOPA-Rope-a-dope (by Stewart Baker)
http://volokh.com/2011/12/14/sopa-rope-a-dope/

Technical Comments on Mandated DNS Filtering Requirements of H. R. 3261 (”SOPA”)
http://www.circleid.com/posts/20111211_technical_comments_on_mandated_dns_filtering_requirements_sopa/

Combating Cybercrime: Principles, Policies, and Programs

..and Michael blogged an executive summary here.

The executive executive summary is:

Technical measures alone cannot significantly address the cybercrime trends, we believe action is needed, and are proposing a multi-faceted regulatory approach. We’re occasionally asked to “list the three things you want us to do.” And while we’re hesitant to say any of these initiatives is more important than any other, in general, we list:

• Increase investment in cybercrime law enforcement.
• Start the Internet’s version of the National Transportation Safety Board.
• Fix the Cybercrime Convention to include both extradition and trying cases in the country in which alleged criminals reside.

Also, Dave Piscitello, ‘The Security Skeptic’, reviewed the whitepaper here.

=JeffH sez check it out

Daniel Stenberg - The cookie RFC 6265 (english)
http://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2011/04/28/the-cookie-rfc-6265/

Stéphane Bortzmeyer - RFC 6265: HTTP State Management Mechanism (french)
http://www.bortzmeyer.org/6265.html

Joachim Strömbergson - Cookie-RFCn 6265 (swedish)
http://secworks.se/2011/04/cookie-rfcn-6265/

It feels good to get that out the door!

Representation and Verification of Domain-Based Application Service
Identity within Internet Public Key Infrastructure Using X.509 (PKIX) Certificates in the Context of Transport Layer Security (TLS)

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6125

Alas, we messed up by not including this “short form” title directly in the spec:

TLS/SSL Server Identity Check

But hopefully people will know what spec is meant if someone uses that short-form title.

I’ve written about the spec and its background before:

of TLS/SSL Server Identity Checking

Although we produced the spec without a formal working group, many people contributed to it one way or another. From the Contributors and Acknowledgments sections:

The following individuals made important contributions to the text of this document: Shumon Huque, RL ‘Bob’ Morgan, and Kurt Zeilenga.

The editors and contributors wish to thank the following individuals for their feedback and suggestions: Bernard Aboba, Richard Barnes, Uri Blumenthal, Nelson Bolyard, Kaspar Brand, Anthony Bryan, Scott Cantor, Wan-Teh Chang, Bil Corry, Dave Cridland, Dave Crocker, Cyrus Daboo, Charles Gardiner, Philip Guenther, Phillip Hallam-Baker, Bruno Harbulot, Wes Hardaker, David Harrington, Paul Hoffman, Love Hornquist Astrand, Henry Hotz, Russ Housley, Jeffrey Hutzelman, Cullen Jennings, Simon Josefsson, Geoff Keating, John Klensin, Scott Lawrence, Matt McCutchen, Alexey Melnikov, Subramanian Moonesamy, Eddy Nigg, Ludwig Nussel, Joe Orton, Tom Petch, Yngve N. Pettersen, Tim Polk, Robert Relyea, Eric Rescorla, Pete Resnick, Martin Rex, Joe Salowey, Stefan Santesson, Jim Schaad, Rob Stradling, Michael Stroeder, Andrew Sullivan, Peter Sylvester, Martin Thomson, Paul Tiemann, Sean Turner, Nicolas Williams, Dan Wing, Dan Winship, and Stefan Winter.

Thanks also to Barry Leiba and Ben Campbell for their reviews on behalf of the Security Directorate and the General Area Review Team, respectively.

The responsible Area Director was Alexey Melnikov.

(i.e. 59 people besides PeterSA and myself (wow))

We’ve now heard back from the RFC Editor, and we’re in the so-called “AUTH48 state” where we, the spec’s authors/editors, work with the RFC Editor folks to turn the Internet-Draft into a RFC.

At this point we know the RFC number-to-be: 6125.

So, we’re close to getting this thing out the door, whew.

We’ve been working with browser, server, and web app folk in an IETF working group, “httpstate“, to rectify this, and the draft spec was recently approved for publication as an IETF RFC at the “Proposed Standard” maturity level. This spec differs from the prior specs in that it specifies how cookies are actually used on the Internet today. Anyone crafting a new client or server can implement the spec and have an interoperable implementation as a result.

This is great in that getting this finally explicitly documented will be a key underlying piece of moving “the Web“, and the wider Internet its built upon, on towards its next stage(s). Hopefully, browsers and servers can now converge their “cookie behaviors”

Our more detailed blog post (which includes some history) is here..

‘HTTP State Management Mechanism’ to Proposed Standard
http://www.thesecuritypractice.com/the_security_practice/2011/03/http-state-management-mechanism-to-proposed-standard.html

=JeffH sez check it out

Web (In)Security: Remediation Efforts - Status and Outlook
http://www.thesecuritypractice.com/the_security_practice/2011/03/web-insecurity-remediation-efforts-status-and-outlook.html

Check it out

Additionally, NPR ran an All Things Considered piece yesterday on the wiretapping topic and interviewed Susan for it.

Also, she’s blogging (here) at the the Huffington Post on these and overall security/policy topics.

=JeffH sez check it out

Aside from HSTS, which I’ve written about here earlier, I’ve also been working on a specification for “TLS/SSL Server Identity Checking” along with Peter Saint-Andre.

The basic summary is: you have a DNS domain name identifying some application service (aka “a server”) you wish to connect to over TLS/SSL, e.g. “www.example.org”, and once you do so, how do you really know (and check) that the returned PKIX Certificate contains an identifier(s) that maps to the name of the application service you intended to interact with?

This turns out to be a fairly complex endeavor, and up to the present here, various protocol specs have either specified it on their own, or have referenced another spec that has addressed the problem. One such referenced spec is RFC2830, “Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (v3): Extension for Transport Layer Security“, which I co-authored. So anyway, I got involved a few years back in trying to concoct a dedicated specification for how to do TLS/SSL server identity checking in an application protocol neutral fashion. Eventually, Peter Saint-Andre and I signed up to buckle down and make the spec a reality. Much of this work occurred during 2010.

The resulting internet-draft, draft-saintandre-tls-server-id-check, was approved on 20-Jan-2011 as a Proposed Standard RFC, and will be published as such in the next couple of months. It has this fairly precise but unwieldy title:

“Representation and Verification of Domain-Based Application Service Identity within Internet Public Key Infrastructure Using X.509 (PKIX) Certificates in the Context of Transport Layer Security (TLS)“

In the spec (which has been referred to as “-tls-server-id-check” in various email discussion threads (e.g. see the certid@ietf.org list), we provide an appendix of extracts from various current RFCs that specify performing such a check. The hope is that, going forward, emerging specifications can simply reference (i.e. “re-use”), and profile if necessary, the -tls-server-id-check spec. In fact, there’s presently four Internet-Drafts in the RFC-Editor’s work queue that do just that.

=JeffH sez check it out

This particular class of typical website vulnerability has been known for ages, as well as techniques for addressing it. For example, websites can simply offer their entire site over TLS/SSL (i.e. via “HTTPS“), as PayPal does. Some sites do so, but for whatever reason still revert users communications to unsecured HTTP by default, or some portion of their communications remain unsecured. However, if one can configure one’s browser to only securely interact with some given site (i.e. domain), and if the site supports this, then Problem Largely Solved. See, for example, Collin Jackson and Adam Barth’s paper, ForceHTTPS: Protecting High-Security Web Sites from Network Attacks, for a description of this class of vulnerabilities, attacks, and remediation approaches.

I’ve been working with Collin and Adam on standardizing ForceHTTPS — their paper was the inspiration for the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) work and the present Internet-Draft specification thereof, and thus the HSTS implementations presently available in Firefox 3.x (via the Force-TLS and NoScript plugins), natively in Firefox 4 beta 6 and later, and natively in Chrome 4 and later. There’s also the HTTPS-Everywhere extension from the EFF that comes pre-loaded with a list of sites to use only via HTTPS, and is configurable such that one can add more (unfortunately it doesn’t support HSTS apparently)..

Now, HSTS is a website security policy that in typical cases, sites will explicitly signal to browsers (via an HTTP request header field), as PayPal presently does. However, this week, Sid Stamm, who authored the Firefox v3 HSTS add-on (Force-TLS) and native implementation, conzed-up a new Firefox v4 add-on, STS UI (Strict Transport Security User Interface), that allows one to configure one’s browser to regard given sites as HSTS sites, even if they don’t signal it. This also addresses the Bootstrap MITM Vulnerability noted in the HSTS draft spec.

Note that Chrome features “Preloaded HSTS sites”, and that NoScript (FF v3 & v4), HTTPS-Everywhere (FFv3), and Force-TLS (FFv3) all facilitate user configuration of HTTPS-only sites.

We’ll be working in the new IETF WebSec working group to finish the HSTS draft spec and get it published as an RFC, hopefully before too much of 2011 is gone. I’ll try to keep you all updated on that.

In the meantime, =JeffH sez be careful with your web logins

updated 31-Oct-2010: Added NoScript and HTTPS-Everywhere. Apologies to Giorgio and the EFF for not including them straight away.