

Google to offer encrypted search next week - rooshdi
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20005055-265.html

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petercooper
It's cool that Google is already starting to copy features from Duck Duck Go
;-) Next stop: promising not to keep a log of our searches, or assuming I want
to be "signed in" on Search, just because I am on Reader..?

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tptacek
In fairness, implementing it on Google's scale is not really the same
"feature", and since Duck Duck Go isn't a self-contained search engine, you
can still question how end-to-end secure its final implementation is.

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jpeterson
Why would it be any different on Google's scale? I mean, presumably the
solution is the same install-ssl-plugin-and-point-it-to-a-cert fare that you
would go through for any web server. Am I missing something here?

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tptacek
I think you're missing how expensive it is to make SSL work on a large scale.
That being the reason it isn't the default everywhere.

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reitzensteinm
Does the cost of SSL grow super linearly when you scale up?

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CapitalistCartr
Super linearly is a new term to me, but it doesn't grow linearly. However, it
does grow, and Google is huge. The cost, in terms of labor, focus bandwidth,
and money, is large at their scale.

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briansmith
The cost of TLS is linear in every way I can think of. The TLS handshake is
basically constant overhead--in space and time--and O(n)--in space and time--
transform of the actual data.

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tptacek
The constant factors are high relative to simply serving HTML, especially on a
site that tracks non-encrypted performance down to the millisecond.

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reitzensteinm
Sure, but talking about it being expensive 'on a large scale' is a bit odd -
since revenue/profits also grow with scale. It seems to imply a greater than
linear growth in costs.

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timr
Google has a completely different back-end architecture than a dinky website,
and the costs come from the sophistication and complexity of the systems
required at that scale.

Google has multiple data centers, dedicated caching and web clusters, complex
internal network routing and load-balancing, etc. Then there's stuff like
javascript and image hosting optimizations that you've got to make sure work
without triggering SSL warnings across thousands of servers. Enabling SSL
support for something like Googe search could potentially touch tens of
thousands of systems. In short, maybe it's as simple as flipping a bit to
enable SSL on the web farm, but I doubt it. There's probably a massive amount
of internal engineering and organization behind the change, and _that_ cost is
what you're neglecting.

To give you perspective, it's trivial to enable SSL on a single-box website;
it can be done in an afternoon. When we turned it on at Justin.tv, it took a
few days (let's call it a week) of initial work, and ongoing maintenance costs
to make sure that SSL sessions weren't breaking as we made improvements across
the site. The costs go up as you get bigger and more complicated.

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Retric
If it takes 4 hour to get SSL working for a site with 5,000 users then linear
growth to a site with 250,000,000 users is 50,000 hours. IMO, google can get
SSL working in less than 50,000 hours.

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MikeCapone
How far are we from just encrypting everything on the web because it has a
negligible cost? Is this purely CPU-limited or is there another reason (does
it take much more bandwidth? screw with caching?)? Is Moore's Law taking care
of this quickly, or is it still far off?

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amalcon
"Screw with caching" is probably the biggest issue. In order to negotiate the
SSL connection, any proxy (on either end) needs to have your certificate.
There's also the issue that some browsers (Firefox, I'm looking at you) do
their best to scare users about self-signed certificates, which means that you
need to pay for a cert.

It also breaks the shared-hosting model: your entire HTTP stream is encrypted,
which means that key negotiation occurs before the server has your HOST
header. This, in turn, means that the TCP/IP data (IPs and ports) are the only
pieces of information that the server can use to determine which certificate
to use. In practice, this means that a server can only host multiple distinct
sites if it has multiple distinct IPs.

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jmillikin

      There's also the issue that some browsers (Firefox, I'm looking at you) do their best to scare users about self-signed certificates, which means that you need to pay for a cert.
    

Firefox is absolutely in the right, here. Self-signed certificates are
worthless; if you'd like a free certificate, use StartCom or CACert.

    
    
      It also breaks the shared-hosting model: your entire HTTP stream is encrypted, which means that key negotiation occurs before the server has your HOST header.
    

This is only true for older servers; modern TLS implementations support name-
based certificate negotiation.

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amalcon
They're worthless except insofar as they let you get the encryption benefit
out of SSL without paying the cost necessary to get the authentication
benefit.

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jmillikin
What's the point of encryption if you don't know what server you're connected
to? Somebody could be intercepting your traffic, and you wouldn't realize it.

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amalcon
The point is to stop one particular class of attacker: the one that's
passively sniffing and archiving network traffic while trying to remain
invisible (and thus isn't actually altering the traffic profile). This is a
benefit (over in-the-clear HTTP), but Firefox and others effectively tell
users that it's more dangerous than regular HTTP.

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benologist
Now we feel safe knowing only Google's watching and analyzing everything we
do!

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jhancock
"Google encrypted all Gmail accounts in response to the hacking incidents that
prompted its decision to move its Chinese-language search operation from
Beijing to Hong Kong."

Its a shame they couldn't do it because customers have been asking for it.

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dedward
I believe gmail always had HTTPS as an option - in 2008 they added an option
to selectively make it the default if you want - now they've reversed that and
made it the default from the start. There is strong reasoning, backed up by
user experience testing that the small delays introduced by SSL on web pages
add up to big drops in retention... and business is business. HTTPS connection
setup is significantly slower than a regular connection - you may not think
that sub-second delays matter but they absolutely do in the competitive web-
app world.

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jhancock
Do you have evidence that HTTPS results in user retention problems for gmail?
I have heard that it may for search. These are two very different use cases. I
can recall users and articles in years past asking for https to be default for
gmail. Yes, us geeks knew its been an option for a while. My original post was
simply pointing that the decision should be made based on what users
want...not as an excuse so the media or Google can publish inflammatory digs
in their issues with China.

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ck2
So if SSL has such little overhead today regardless of scale (and can be
hardware accelerated) what the heck is PayPal's excuse for being so horribly
slow? Gmail can run rings around it with far more data.

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dublinclontarf
I imagine they would offer it as an option in your Google account settings,
similar to GMail before it was made default. That will certainly make
censorship MUCH more difficult, and if they include Google cache in this
(which was used for a time to get around the Great FireWall of China) we would
have something of a winning combination.

On the other hand, the Chinese government might just ban Google search
outright for such a move, although they haven't done this for GMail yet.

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emily37
More difficult but still far from impossible... All China needs is a Chinese
CA to issue them a certificate for Google and then they can do a nice MITM
without the user seeing even a single warning.

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avar
There have been totally unproved speculations that they've been doing that.
But if they did it on a scale like that their CA would be revoked from all
default browser installations.

They could still force the issue and mandate that their CA be patched back in
on all computers sold in mainland China.

Either case seems very unlikely, just outright blocking things they don't like
seems to be their current approach. I don't see why they'd change that for
Google.

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jhancock
"Now, if you are on an airport Wi-Fi or other public network everything you
search for is in the clear."

ok, and most search results you click on will take you somewhere not secure.
There may be little value add here.

From re-reading this article, it actually contains no value expect the
headline itself. cnet should start just doing tweets instead of bothering to
try to fill a page.

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Groxx
Seriously? You don't see a use for secured searches?

How do you think the Chinese government will like this? Or any government who
attempts to censor searches? How will they know what's being searched for?
Also, a lot of value can be gleaned from just the results, and not _all_ lead
to insecure sites.

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jhancock
Me personally? I want https for gmail...ok, I've had it since around 2008. For
web search? If I'm going to search on something top secret I wouldn't want
Google to have identifiable info on me either so I wouldn't use Google or I
would try to obfuscate my identity from Google through other means. So, for
me, https on search isn't a common use case.

As to China: I think China will block https search on Google. I think any
government that censors search will block https search on Google. Playing the
China card on this new feature isn't interesting. Google and/or the press
should not try to score points through inflammatory China comments with this
new feature rollout. Https search should be added simply because its a feature
users want; and I'm sure some do.

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barredo
How will this affect web traffic analytics? Will encrypted searches still be
abled to be logged as referrers? For SEO/PPC/Analytics/Etc purposes

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dedward
The only difference is in the transport - HTTPS instead of HTTP. Everything
else about the protocol is the same - browsers can still send referrer
information in their requests, cookies can still be set, and so on - it's just
that a passive observer sniffing the network will not be able to see anything
other than an encrypted connection to google.

This really is google just playing their cards at the right time and cashing
in on the current privacy bandwagon in the media, casting themselves in a
positive light. It doesn't alleviate any real privacy issues, whatever they
are, with google.

There isn't a downside for us users - it's a good option for google to provide
- it will cost them money in infrastructure, and will slow down the user
experience by a significant factor - (you might not thing a half second
matters, but it does, and google knows this - so this is possibly a convenient
time for them to introduce this feature while people are focused on WHY
privacy is important)

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marcinw
Actually... the browser won't send a referer to a HTTP site if coming from
HTTPS. From the RFC:
[http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec15.html#sec15...](http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec15.html#sec15.1.3)

"Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP
request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol."

I wonder if Google will implement POST forms instead of GET to prevent caching
of request-uri data by the browser as well as proper Cache-
Control/Pragma/Expires headers to prevent caching of search results.

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MikeCapone
What we need is the equivalent of "privacy mode" that browsers have. Hit a
switch somewhere or go to some URL, and suddenly your searching using an
encrypted connection and no logs at all are being kept.

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r0s
This is the obvious point, and I have to wonder if it would defeat the money-
making potential of search data once it becomes common practice.

Maybe it's just another feature that makes google the best search provider. If
they don't do it, someone else will.

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MikeCapone
Most people never change the default setting on anything, so I doubt it would
have a huge impact on them. But it would certainly make power-users happy.

