The ability for third parties to sniff your traffic is a big problem.
Google is not doing this without interest, but I guess it overall is beneficial for us as well...
The hypocrisy here is amazing, too, because while pushing HTTPS, Google itself is actively following everybody around, tracking everything they do online.
The article is about one practical measure that a browser maker has taken to improve the piece of user-facing software that they are responsible for, and some users of that software are applauding this improvement.
Having said that, I do accept your over all point that there is a lot of other work that still needs to be done in securing the web. As you suggest, that's not going to be easy, but let's not fail to fix the things that we can fix already.
The obvious one is that it makes your traffic hard or impossible to sniff.
What's often overlooked is that it also makes your session highly resistant to tampering by 3rd parties. These parties include:
1. Anybody who might have access to your home WIFI network.
2. Your Internet Service Provider. There's been plenty of documented cases where ISPs have injected 'harmless' HTML.
3. Any number of bad actors if you're using any kind of public WIFI.
4. National actors. That's the NSA in the United States, where we have clear evidence that they have been capable of intercepting unsecured connections and injecting unreleased attacks into targeted computers.
This is not tinfoil hat stuff.
The benefit of https is undeniably greater than the cost.
I'm not crazy about how Google throws their weight around in a lot of cases either. But in this case, I think they're doing the right thing.
An ISP is by definition a man in the middle, and unless the user checks certificates for every page and resource they fetch then the ISP can inject their own certs and monitor traffic if they really want to.
And most of the time national actors like the NSA will have better ways of getting the information if they need it
In any case, I don't think "an ISP could inject their own certs very easily" is a fair characterization unless you put it on the same footing as "anyone with your email can get people to install malware easily".
As a concrete example, Lenovo were caught.
Three things not two. Confidentiality, Integrity, and Authentication.
If I'm passively browsing I don't really care too much. If I'm submitting forms, or working in a authenticated session, that's a different matter of course.
And as easy as it is to get a certificate these days, what does it really prove? It stops 3rd party snooping, but then again so does a self-signed certificate.
Whether an EV certificate should do much more for trust than DV is a matter of some debate.
Let's Encrypt offered three of the Ten, but one was discovered to be flawed due to the way some major bulk hosting services are configured, so that leaves two (of Nine, since in practice any implementation of the Tenth Blessed Method is flawed the same way).
Even flawed Blessed Methods are far superior to the checking (basically none) we can reasonably expect from a normal person using a web browser. But still, improvements upon the Blessed Methods are a topic of public discussion, if you think you genuinely have a better way you should definitely let the CA/B Forum or m.d.s.policy know about it.
>It's just too easy to get them to think they really mean anything.
I'm not sure what you mean by this:
1. Are you saying that there is a vulnerability where you can get a valid certificate for a domain you don't own?
2. Do you mean the fact that valid owners of a domain can get a certificate easily?
If 1, please provide more info. If 2, why is that a bad thing?