Re: A couple of questions and concerns about Emacs network security

[Jimmy Yuen Ho Wong]

> Write some ert tests, but this should affect the doc effort

I mean it shouldn't... I can't type

On Sat, Jul 7, 2018 at 10:59 AM, Jimmy Yuen Ho Wong <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 7, 2018 at 10:36 AM, Robert Pluim <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Jimmy Yuen Ho Wong <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> I disagree that prompting for pretty much every TLS connection is a
>>> good idea. In security circles these days, there's such a thing known
>>> as "security fatigue". Overly troublesome security measure that don't
>>> take human psychology into account will lead to numbness. A side
>>> effect of that is users will simply start ignoring security warnings
>>> like they skip reading iTunes's EULA. This is an adverse unintended
>>> consequence that achieves the opposite of what we want to do here.
>>
>> For normal usage, we should absolutely not prompt too much [1]. Iʼm not
>> recommending 'paranoid' to anyone, but in my specific circumstances
>> itʼs the right thing to do.
>>
>
> I still fail to see what those circumstances are that warrant
> prompting the user whenever he visits a URL with TLS that he hasn't
> visited before.
>
>>>>>> `gnutls-min-prime-bits` should be `nil` on Emacs 26.2
>>>>
>>>> That might be going a bit far, but I can certainly do that locally and
>>>> see what happens.
>>>>
>>>
>>> As I've said, setting `gnutls-min-prime-bits` to nil simply means
>>> GnuTLS will negotiate the right number of DH bits on the user's
>>> behalf, starting from 1008 bits since 3.3.0.
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Documentation is good. Iʼll see if I can find some time to work on
>>>> that.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks for helping out :)
>>
>> Is your work on a git branch somewhere?
>
> It's on Github: https://github.com/wyuenho/emacs/tree/additional-nsm-checks
>
> Diff to master:
> https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/compare/master...wyuenho:additional-nsm-checks
>
> You can just fork my fork and send over a PR.
>
> There's still a couple of things I need to do:
>
> 1. Implement `nsm-trust-local-network`
> 2. Remove that change in src/gnutls.h not needed for bug#31946 (this
> is from my OCSP stash still sitting on my machine)
> 3. Write some ert tests, but this should affect the doc effort
> 4. I might throw in a few more checks to detech DHE-DSS key exchange
> and DSA signature. IETF TLSWG has removed it from TLS 1.3, so do
> browsers, but I haven't been able to find much information about them
> other than they are not used. There's a claim made that DSS key
> exchange is just as bad as static RSA, but DHE-DSS is not that same as
> DSS...
>
> Thanks again!
>
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Robert
>>
>> Footnotes:
>> [1]  If you fix the double-prompting caused by google's certificate
>>      load-balancing, that would reduce it a lot for me :-)
>>