| > Am I safe? No. Because any entity with access to the private key of any of the certificate authorities trusted by my machine, is capable of intercepting the communication between my machine and my server, simply by MITM. You're probably more safe than you'd think. Certificate Transparency is now required for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari or you'll get an error message during the TLS connection, before any private data is sent to the (potentially MITM'd) site. Given that all certificates are logged, site operators can use some of the many CT alert websites to let them know if and when a new certificate is issued for their domain, so if some random authority they haven't heard of before issues a cert or it's done at a time they know they didn't need to renew their certs, it'd be time to raise major alarms about the occurrence and thus would mean instant loss of all business for that authority; plus, shockwaves would be sent across the internet as this would be a huge event, especially if it's against a company worth burning a CT for (eg. Google which houses so many fortune 500
companies' secrets). > the .onion domains include public keys. The .onion domain is, in itself, a public key. The side effects of your proposed solution are: A) it would mean you HAVE to trust whoever sent you a link A) 1) for web-based referrals, this would mean you trust your (possibly state-sponsored) search engine to never MITM you (this is currently mitigated by CT which would expose Google's GTS issuing a random domain's cert) A) 2) for IRL events, this would mean you have to trust that the business themselves put up a certain QR code with the public key and not some malicious actor B) This would mean site.com could never rotate their private key without changing all of their backlinks to one with the correct public key. These are all problems Tor already faces - you have no idea if the onion site you're linked to is actually the site it says it is if it perfectly mimics it and/or reverse proxies the real site. You're currently always advised to get URLs from a trusted source once then only use bookmarks to access them to prevent reverse engineering. And you can't rotate your private key without doing this domain change. |