[ivanr]

That's clearly true from the usability perspective. However, the problem is that bulk redirections like that make it very difficult to catch insecure resources.

For example, let's suppose you have a secure page that's referencing some JavaScript resource via a plain-text connection. Because of the redirection, the browser will ultimately fetch the required file, but only trying plain-text HTTP first. That one plain-text request can be hijacked by a man-in-the-middle attacker and abused to take over the victim's browser (and account).

Further, if your users have bookmarks to plain-text pages, their first access to your web site is always going to be insecure, which means that they can be attacked via sslstrip.

These problems are solved with Strict Transport Security, but it will probably take some time until we can fully rely on it.

In the meantime, the plain-text URL can be preserved, and the redirection carried out via an intermediary page that explains why links to plain-text pages are dangerous. It's ugly, but I don't think there's a better (safer) way.

[trust-me]

Yes, these are real problems, but how is redirecting to the home page helping in any way? When the user navigates back to the page she wanted the in-secure script will still be fetched. A MITM is still able to serve a copy of your page.

[ivanr]

I wasn't arguing for redirecting to the home page, only to avoid redirecting (to the intended destination on port 443) automatically.

If a user's browser ever sends a port 80 request, you've already lost (assuming the MITM is there). On your end you may even never see a plaintext request. But in all other instances, displaying an intermediary page is a chance to educate your users, and possibly get them to change their bookmarks.

Further, with little work you may be forcing the MITM to do some custom coding (a lot of work) in order to make the attack seamless.

I wouldn't do this for just any web site, but if you're running a bank or something similarly sensitive, it would probably be worth it.

[kijin]

If a user's browser ever sends a port 80 request, you've already lost (assuming the MITM is there).

Not really. Although old browsers don't support HSTS, they still respect the "secure" flag in cookies. So if an old browser ever requests an insecure resource, no cookies are sent with it, so the bad guys can MITM your connection all day long and no harm will be done. You only need to make sure that your own web pages never request resources over HTTP, and this is relatively easy to do.

> On your end you may even never see a plaintext request.

If so, there's no point doing fancy redirects anyway. How do you redirect a request that you never see? Therefore this scenario isn't really worth losing sleep over.

> displaying an intermediary page is a chance to educate your users, and possibly get them to change their bookmarks.

Users don't want to be educated, period.

Also, technically when a browser encounters a 301 redirect, it should update the relevant bookmark automatically. In reality no browser does this, but that's what the standards say anyway.

[ivanr]

> Although old browsers don't support HSTS, they still respect the "secure" flag in cookies. So if an old browser ever requests an insecure resource, no cookies are sent with it, so the bad guys can MITM your connection all day long and no harm will be done.

Not true. Once a MITM hijacks the victim's communication with the server, she can do whatever she wants, including stripping the "secure" flag from session cookies. She may not be able to compromise a previous secure cookie, but she can hijack a brand new session, wait for the user to authenticate, and gain access that way. The communication from the victim to the MITM will be plain-text with insecure session cookies; the communication from the MITM to the server can be SSL with secure cookies.

And if we're talking just about an insecure resource (not a page, but, for example, a JavaScript file), the MITM can simply inject malicious code into it and hijack the browser that way.

[GauntletWizard]

How about this: You run two instances of Apache, one only loaded with the rewrite rule and only serving on :80, and check those logs regularly?

[ivanr]

You can check the logs even with a single web server instance, provided you keep separate access logs for ports 80 and 443. But people don't do that. Forcing the web site to break is also forcing the developers to realize there is a problem, and to deal with it.