Feature Request: Private Syme servers

[micahflee]

This is more of a feature request than a bug report, but I think it will be important in the future.

I think many organizations would love to host private Syme servers to host their internal groups. I can see a situation where a user would want to connect to the main Syme server as well as one or more private ones.

In this case, I think it would make sense to let the user have multiple Syme toolbar buttons, one for each server. I suppose mobile apps would let you switch between servers, similar to how the Twitter mobile app lets you switch between Twitter accounts.

How would private Syme servers deal with SSL? Would they be required to use SSL, and would they be required to get their cert signed by a CA or could the Syme interface let users input an SSL fingerprint when configuring it? If the user manually enters an SSL fingerprint this would have the added benefit of allowing certificate pinning for private servers.

[louismullie]

Hi Micah,

This is definitely something we're considering - whether this would be part of the main extension or whether it would better fit as an add-on is something that remains to be determined. If users want to roll their own servers, it would have to be made very clear that they're doing it at their own risk. Keeping in mind that everything except the content is not encrypted on our platform, server or connection compromise could leak metadata. Therefore, we would force the use of SSL by default, since that's a bare minimum we think everyone should be using.

Regarding certificate pinning, I'm probably missing something obvious, but I am not aware of any ways to achieve this within the Javascript execution context. From what I understand, XmlHttpRequest doesn't expose SSL certificates to that environment. I'm seeing some discussions at the W3C that sound interesting, but nothing quite concrete at the moment. I also found some code for Firefox, but it uses vendor-specific extensions and the whole process looks a bit sketchy.

I know you have a lot of experience in this field. Your input is very much appreciated!

[micahflee]

Ah yes. I think that any way to inspect SSL certificates inside Javascript will be dependent on the browser you're using, which means you would have to maintain this type of code for multiple browsers. And for iOS and Android apps that use webkit webviews, you would probably have to create a local MITM proxy server in Obj-C and Java in order to inspect the certs.

It's definitely possible though though, at least in Firefox (you found the right link that explains it, I think). The Firefox version of HTTPS Everywhere lets you opt-in to the decentralized SSL Observatory. If users opt-in, they send copies of the SSL certs they see to the observatory server to add to our database, and this is all done in Javascript. Here's the code that does it: https://gitweb.torproject.org/https-everywhere.git/blob/HEAD:/src/components/ssl-observatory.js#l142

The Chromium version of HTTPS Everywhere doesn't have the SSL Observatory as a feature though, and I'm not sure if no one has tried implementing it or if Chromium just doesn't offer access to inspect the certs in any way.

[Gunni]

What about making it peer to peer, somehow, or something?

All group members share responsibility of the group content they are part of.

Maybe allow users to have a hosted server by giving it access to the group, or even just the server storing the encrypted content for a specified group, or something.

Sorry... just brainstorming...