new_SSL_certificate.mdwn

[[!meta date="Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:01:54 +0100"]]
[[!meta title="New SSL certificate for tails.boum.org"]]
[[!tag announce]]

[[!toc levels=2]]

On the same day Tails 0.10 was put out, our website started to use a
commercial SSL certificate. This new certificate replaces the previous one that
was delivered by the non-commercial [CACert certificate
authority](http://www.cacert.org/).

What are SSL certificates?
==========================

Using HTTPS instead of plain HTTP to connect to a website allows you to encrypt
your communication with the server. But encryption alone does not guarantee
that you are talking with the right server, and not
someone impersonating it, for example in case of a [[man-in-the-middle
attack|doc/about/warning#man-in-the-middle]].

SSL certificates try to solve this problem. A SSL certificate is usually issued by
a certificate authority to certify the identity of a server. When you reach a
website your web browser might trust an SSL certificate automatically if it trusts
the authority that issued it.

Commercial certificate authorities are making a living out of selling SSL
certificates; they are usually trusted automatically by most of the
browsers.  Other non-commercial authorities, such as
[CACert](http://www.cacert.org/), need to be installed by the operating system
or by the user to avoid displaying a security warning when visiting the website.

Weaknesses of the system
========================

But this trust system has proven to be flawed in many ways. For example, during
2011, two certificate authorities were compromised, and many fake certificates
were issued and used in the wild. See [Comodo: The Recent RA
Compromise](http://blogs.comodo.com/it-security/data-security/the-recent-ra-compromise/)
and [The Tor Project: The DigiNotar Debacle, and what you should do about
it](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/diginotar-debacle-and-what-you-should-do-about-it).

It is clear for us that getting an commercial SSL certificate is not enough to
strongly authenticate our website, and for example authenticity of our releases.
That's why we always propose you [[stronger ways of authenticating our Tails
release|install/download/openpgp]] using OpenPGP signatures.

Why get a commercial certificate then?
======================================

Still we decided to get a commercial certificate for the following reasons:

- It makes it harder to setup a simplistic [[man-in-the-middle
  attacks|doc/about/warning#man-in-the-middle]] against the people who didn't use HTTPS so
  far to visit our website.
- Our website now is only available with HTTPS enabled. This may be
  important to provide some confidentiality while posting on the forum
  for example.