[Python-Dev] PEP 476: Enabling certificate validation by default! (original) (raw)

Gregory P. Smith greg at krypto.org
Mon Sep 8 23:35:19 CEST 2014

On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 3:48 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

Guido van Rossum writes:

> lot: five years ago (when I worked at Google!) it was common to find > internal services that required SSL but had a misconfigured certificate, > and the only way to access those services was to override the browser > complaints. Today (working at Dropbox, a much smaller company!) I don't > even remember the last time I had to deal with such a browser complaint -- I would tend to discount your recent experience, then. Smaller (and possibly even more important in this fast-developing area, younger) organizations are a lot more nimble about things like this.

As a defensive data point: I don't remember a single instance of this happening for Google internal services, at least since I arrived in 2007. I'm not doubting that Guido remembers some thing(s) but in general people here at Google would not stand for that, then or now. I would not call it common, especially five years ago.

Common things I have encountered over the years everywhere I've been both internal and external: services that listen on the https port 443 but don't have a valid cert as they are intended only for http port 80 access. Those are becoming somewhat less common, the only thing I regularly see that on anymore is random home router web config UIs as issuing a signed server certificate for security hole ridden commodity embedded box is... a challenge.

(I'm not commenting on the PEP plans as it seems the right things are happening for now)

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