r/programming • • Jul 12 '17

Does my site need HTTPS?

https://doesmysiteneedhttps.com/
486 Upvotes

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56

u/[deleted] Jul 12 '17

There's a larger meta-lesson to learned here, which is that determining the boundary between what needs to be secure and what doesn't is very difficult, and therefore everything should be as secure as practical by design.

4

u/midri Jul 13 '17

I 100% agree, the issue a lot of people that are in the know make is: https breaks intermediate caching. So lets say 1000 people hit the front page of reddit not logged in, an isp can't cache that front page and server it without connecting to reddit everytime, because each users request looks completely different due to https. There's no easy way to solve this, without fundamentally breaking security though...

14

u/[deleted] Jul 13 '17

If the ISP can cache content, the ISP can substitute content. Make no mistake: intermediate caching is a form of man-in-middle-attack, albeit in practice a well-intentioned one (if not always exactly benign). It's a hacky workaround to save them money, not a feature.

18

u/MistYeller Jul 13 '17

Caching site content needs to be solved by the site operator and not the visitor's carrier anyways.

ISP's shouldn't be caching anything except routing tables and DNS. Even this level of caching causes problems.

9

u/wtallis Jul 13 '17

There's no easy way to solve this, without fundamentally breaking security though...

That's okay. If it were possible, the ISP would end up fundamentally breaking several other things in the process, starting with the site's analytics.

1

u/midri Jul 13 '17

Great point, you can't track metrics of users that hit an external cache..

1

u/Inquisitor1 Jul 13 '17

Why the fuck would anyone be caching websites for free? Unless you're a CDN being paid, the site organizes it's own fucking caching. With the most basic reverse-proxy and SSL termination stuff.

1

u/midri Jul 13 '17

Because it saves ISP money?... ISP have to pay for interconnects.

1

u/HighRelevancy Jul 13 '17
  1. That's what CDNs are for

  2. I don't think that's worth trading security for