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https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

A big part of the problem here is that vendors do a _lousy_ job of making this easy. An out-of-box Apache is a fairly good HTTP server, but it'll take you an hour with a good tutorial to make it a half-way decent HTTPS server. Not because HTTPS is inherently difficult but because no relevant expertise was brought to bear in Apache's implementation.

And this isn't just a Unix flavour problem, the IIS handling of TLS is garbage too. Microsoft has documentation that's incomplete or flat wrong, and then you're expected to muddle along following blog posts and video tutorials.

There's a LOT of cargo culting in this space. Almost every instance of the name "Middlesex" you see in an X.509 certificate is a result of this sort of cargo culting, because the postal county of Middlesex ceased to exist before X.509 was even created, but it looks superficially as though you need to specify a "county" in X.509 and so people based in London dredged up Middlesex. And it didn't _break_ anything so they kept doing it without knowing why.



FWIW, Apache is getting native support for ACME certs: https://letsencrypt.org/2017/10/17/acme-support-in-apache-ht...

Hopefully in the future more web servers will implement this, and HTTPS will be enabled as the default configuration.


That was one of my favorite Mozilla Open Source Support projects!




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