alt Hacker NewsWhen I connect my server over SSH, I don't have to rotate anything, yet my connection is always secure.
I manually approve the authenticity of the server on the first connection.
From then, the only time I'd be prompted again would be, if either the server changed or if there's a risk of MITM.
Why can't we have this for the web?
Replies
Would the issue not be that you would need to trust that first connection?
SSH has its own certificate authority system to validate users and servers. This is because trust-on-first-use is not scalable unless you just ignore the risk (at which point you may as well not do encryption at all), so host keys are signed.
There is quite literally nothing that prevents you from putting a self-signed server certificate. Your browser will even ask you to trust and store the certificate like your client does on the screen that shows the fingerprint.
Good luck getting everyone else to trust your fingerprint, though.
> Why can't we have this for the web?
How do you propose to scale trust on first use? SSH basically says the trusting of a key is "out of scope" for them and makes it your problem. As in: You can put on a piece of paper, tell it over the phone, whatever, but SSH isn't going to solve it for you. How is some user landing on a HTTPS site going to determine the key used is actually trustworthy?
There have actually been attempts at solving this with some thing like DANE [1]. For a brief period Chrome had DANE support but it was removed due to being too complicated and being in (security) critical components. Besides, since DNSSEC has some cracks in it (you local resolver probably doesn't check it) you can have a discussion about how secure DANE is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na...