On Sep 21, 2011, at 3:57 AM, Chris Palmer wrote: >> And one comment as to substance. Section 3.1 says "Have a safety net. >> Generate a backup key pair, get it signed..." I agree that this is a good >> idea for e-commerce site that lose sales on any outage. But what if I >> generate a backup key pair for my personal website (www.yoavnir.com is not >> it!), and not get it signed at all? Then if my regular private key gets >> compromised, I then get it signed by some other CA (or the same CA). With DV >> certificates this takes minutes. > > That part is not MUST, and is in a section called "guidance". So it's > not a mandate. Also later on we acknowledge the last-minute signing > case. > > Also, we say at the outset that HSTS certificate pinning is for sites > with high operational maturity — if an operator is not prepared to > plan for disaster, that's a sign they might not need or want HSTS > certificate pinning. At least not now, in this early stage. I don't > want for this feature to get a bad reputation when unprepared > operators get burned.
HSTS (with or without pinning) is a security feature. It prevents certain kinds of attacks. Yes, it requires operational maturity in the sense that you can't let your certificate expire or introduce new keys at a moment's notice. Organizations like the IETF or power utilities should have that kind of operational maturity and need for security. A requirement for 5 nines or uptime is a different thing. Many websites can live with some downtime. So if you have a serious compromise, you take down the server, get the certificate signed, and bring the server back up. This can all be done in under an hour, and that's acceptable to many. Obviously not the likes of Paypal, Amazon, or Google. But allnaturalpet.com ? The lost sales from that 1 hour downtime after a rare key compromise may not be worth the hassle of getting a second certificate. _______________________________________________ websec mailing list websec@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/websec
