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Mozilla Considers Phasing Out Unencrypted HTTP

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-the-end-of-the-web-as-we-know-it-and-i-feel-fine dept.

Phoronix reports the Mozilla Security Engineering team is planning to make their browser useless for browsing much of the World Wide Web, by deprecating insecure HTTP.

Richard Barnes of Mozilla writes:

In order to encourage web developers to move from HTTP to HTTPS, I would like to propose establishing a deprecation plan for HTTP without security. Broadly speaking, this plan would entail limiting new features to secure contexts, followed by gradually removing legacy features from insecure contexts. Having an overall program for HTTP deprecation makes a clear statement to the web community that the time for plaintext is over -- it tells the world that the new web uses HTTPS, so if you want to use new things, you need to provide security.

See also this document outlining the initial plans.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by lentilla on Wednesday April 15 2015, @08:30PM

    by lentilla (1770) on Wednesday April 15 2015, @08:30PM (#171176)

    there is a risk of weakening trust in the web with mass adoption of https

    That's insightful - if hobby pages use https, then it de-values the "lock icon" on my bank's website. Quite true.

    The flip side is that the whole Certificate Authority is broken by design anyway. Maybe wholesale adoption of https is what will drive us to fix the mess.

    by implying that parties receiving a certificate have been screened, inferring a level a trust

    I think I'd prefer the [misplaced] trust in the system to be weakened sooner rather than later. All that "lock icon" represents is that information is being transmitted to another party in encrypted form. It makes no real guarantee who that party happens to be.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @10:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2015, @10:01PM (#171196)

    We gave on that a while ago. HTTPS is used for verifying that you really are connected to the domain in your browser's address bar and that no one else can read or modify your communications with that domain. Extended Validation Certificates [wikipedia.org] are for verifying that a specific organization has control over that domain.