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Is HTTPS a scam?
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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Don't play the fool.
If "charging $1000 for security certificates" became common practice (much like HTTPS) then you would be stuck paying it.
(And maybe there would be a "standards of behavior" clause in the security certificate contract too. lol)
You are now dependent on a third party gatekeeper. He can bend you over literally any way at all. He just hasn't yet.
And that goes for the legal authority behind that authority too, of course.
That's a good theory sir/lady, and actually was the case until around 10 years ago.
Then Snowden happened, and we found out that the nsa is sucking all unencrypted traffic out of the net and into their databases.
Then letsencrypt happened and now you can get your certificates for free. Don't pay 1000$. Letsencrypt is free and you can automatically update certificates. If your hoster doesn't offer https for free, choose a different hoster.
there's still the very real possibility they're hoovering all the encrypted data, too. and storing the stuff to/from 'interesting' end points for later 'analysis'--that is, if they don't already have the current tech broken.
Sure, but one thing we learned is that encryption sure makes things more annoying for them
Yes it's free today. Maybe not tomorrow. And the fact remains that you need permission from a third party (basically a gov official) to have a website now. Doesn't that trouble you?
No, and its clear you don’t understand the fundamentals here and you are throwing around baseless stats.
It’s not even about the certificate itself but the trust of who generates the cert. Just about anyone can generate a https cert, therefore it will always be free.
Who’s going to trust a company selling certs for $1000? Now that money is involved, trust is lost and the cert becomes worthless.
Consider. We're all using HTTPS and depending on certs.
Suddenly a wild threat appears.
For our own safety, from now on, certs will only be issued by those who get special permission from the gov.
Google will be cooperating in this.
It's technically trivial after all, because we're all already using HTTPS anyway. It's just a matter of changing the lock on the gate.
Thank you for your cooperation in these troublesome times.
(And a year later. We're installing new security software. We need to charge you $1000/year now. This will have no effect upon our main clients...)
Your entire premise requires sustained cooperation of the whole world to collude and agree on something.
Nah, anyone can become a certificate authority.
The difference is that the current trusted certificate authorities are autonatically trusted by browsers and operating systems.
But you could run your own CA, issue certs for yourself and your friends, and get them to import your CA public key to their trusted CA store.
Then it would work just like getting a cert from letsencrypt. The only difference is that letsencrypt is already included the CA store of OSs and browsers, so people dont have to do all the manual stuff
@KingWizard is right, you don't understand the fundamentals of this. You're asking good questions, but people have been asking them decades ago and already found reasonably good answers. HTTPS works okay for what it does. Check out letsencrypt, watch some talks about it. Informing yourself about the matter will get you further than asking more random questions on lemmy.
And if everyone would suddenly charge $10.000 for food, a lot of people would starve to death! Does that make grocieries stores a scam?
Your scenario is just absurdly unrealistic. Https and TLS are just standards. No single entity controls them. If all the certificate provider would suddenly charge money, you'd have a bunch of new, free certificate provider the next day.
But if you needed permission to be a certificate provider then you'd be stuck.
Once you are dependent upon that official certificate, upon that issuer, you're stuck. At their mercy.
If your browser or your OS insist on only trusting $1000 certificate, blocking access to most of the internet, then change the browser or OS. There is no grand authority telling which root certificates can be trusted. Yes, Google or Apple could scam their users this way if they wish to, but it would not make much sense for them. People would use something else.
You have the timeline backwards. That's pretty much how it was untile letsencrypt hit the scene.
But the technology of https works even with a cert not from a trusted root issuer. You just have that annoying page to click through on web browsers.