Google Offers Encrypted Web Search Option 288
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the helping-you-hide-your-pokemon-obsession dept.
from the helping-you-hide-your-pokemon-obsession dept.
alphadogg writes "People who want to shield their use of Google's Web search engine from network snoops now have the option of encrypting the session with SSL protection. In the case of Google search, SSL will protect the transmission of search queries entered by users and the search results returned by Google servers. Google began rolling out the encrypted version of its Web search engine on Friday. 'We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It's a helpful addition to users' online privacy and security, and we'll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings,' wrote Evan Roseman, a Google software engineer, in an official blog post."
Re:Security != privacy. (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, you still trade your privacy for the service provided by Google; the difference is the trade being less likely to be interrupted now.
Google has never shown any tendency towards abuse of my private data. My government, on the other hand, has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to break its own laws whenever it's convenient for any of their actual constituents, i.e. corporations. I'm much more worried about my government watching my search history than google doing it. Of course, they'll give that information to my government any old time, but that's not the same thing as having it continually logged where it can fire off triggers.
No, I'm not doing anything that I feel my government would attack me for. But then, I'm not doing anything google would attack me for, either. Google continually stands in opposition to the corporations that I am concerned about. The enemy of my enemy may or may not be my friend, but odds are better than if he's my enemy's friend. Contrarily, much of what the U.S. government does makes it the enemy of any right-thinking citizen, where right-thinking is defined as "freedom-loving". (I may have a bias, but I certainly don't hide it.)
Implications on China (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who is this for? (Score:2, Insightful)
SSL adds protection to both ends of the communication. This may look like a circus from the user's perspective; but for Google themselves, it's better self-defense.
Very funny (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Security != privacy. (Score:3, Insightful)
My government, on the other hand, has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to break its own laws whenever it's convenient for any of their actual constituents, i.e. corporations.
You do realize that Google is a corporation too, don't you?
All HTTP traffic should be encrypted (Score:5, Insightful)
As a matter of course, we should use SSL on all connections. In some rare cases the computation may be too much of a burden, but in the vast majority of situations it's trivial and there's no reason not to do it.
IMO, the only reason we don't do it more is because the way browsers handle self-signed certificates is broken.
There's no reason for a browser to throw up nasty error dialogs when it encounters a self-signed certificate. Instead, browsers should silently accept such certificates and record the public key fingerprint. Browsers shouldn't turn on the lock icon when using a self-signed cert, or do anything else to make the user think they're browsing on a secure connection, because they're really not, but they should go ahead and encrypt the traffic.
Not only would that provide some measure of security against eavesdropping, but it would also assist with detection of phishing attacks. Browsers could and should throw up nasty warnings/errors when connecting to a site whose certificate has inexplicably changed. This is similar to how SSH handles trust of server keys, a system that works very well in practice.
Regarding this move by Google, I think it's great. I applauded their decision to make Gmail and Google Apps HTTPS-only, and providing the option for Google Search is great, too. Hopefully they'll eventually go to HTTPS-only for search as well. Their page volumes are such that they'll have to seriously consider the impact of the encryption overhead, but I think they'll get there.
Re:Scroogle is better (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but Scroogle has recently been shut down by Google, so this is their alternative.
http://www.scroogle.org/scrapen8.html [scroogle.org] - well, it certainly didn't take much research to work out that isn't true.
Re:The real reason (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an enhancement that isn't a disadvantage for the user, so we should welcome it.
And if it also prevents man in the middle hacking of web pages it's a good thing.
Re:All HTTP traffic should be encrypted (Score:5, Insightful)
Either you're trolling or you honestly have no idea why it's a good idea to throw up all sorts of errors on encountering a self-signed certificate.
Clue: SSL is intended to guarantee that nobody can eavesdrop on your connection. As soon as you start to see anomalies in the certificate chain (such as a self-signed certificate), that guarantee cannot be upheld.
Did you read my post? That's why the user shouldn't be given any indication that the connection is secured when a self-signed cert has been presented, because it's really not.
Sites where sensitive data is managed should not used self-signed certs, so that the certificate chain can be verified, to defeat MITM attacks. But sites that would currently not use any encryption could increase their security by a non-negligible amount by using HTTPS and a self-signed cert -- but the way browsers handle self-signed certificates is stupid and broken.
IP tracking (Score:3, Insightful)
But google still knows what you did.
think logically (Score:2, Insightful)
In other words, you still trade your privacy for the service provided by Google; the difference is the trade being less likely to be interrupted now.
Privacy isn't an all or nothing proposition. I don't "trade in" my privacy, I disclose information selectively. When I search on a search engine, necessarily that search engine know what I searched for. Google has defined retention policies, and there is no reason to believe that they don't comply with them.
However, there are other aspects of privacy I don't have control over. There's a good chance my ISP is sniffing my packets and my government is digging through them to find whatever the political hangup of the day is, and there's a good chance that what ever they are doing, they are doing incompetently.
Now, I'd like to be able to do web searches without having to second guess whether those searches (innocuous and legal as they are) trigger some stupid keyword alert in some badly written network surveillance system. Hence, I like my connections to my search engine to be encrypted.
What Google does with those searches isn't much of a concern for me: there are no known instances of Google doing data mining on behalf of governments (all they do is respond to specific requests), and all they want to do is show me ads.
So, an encrypted connection to Google protects my privacy in exactly the way I want it to: it keeps the people who have no business looking at my web searches from looking at my web searches. Simple, eh?
Re:The real reason (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't care if it is. I don't know why all of our internet traffic these days isn't encrypted. Good job Google for stepping up even on the simplest of things.
Re:Who is this for? (Score:2, Insightful)
(given google's questionable record on privacy issues)?
Really? Like what?
moved to other search engines
Like which one? Bing? What reason do I have to trust them any more than Google?
I can't help but question who this feature is for.
Pretty much anybody. Right now, your ISP and your government likely are scanning your unencrypted web communications for keywords and prohibited content. Even if you don't do anything wrong, you may trigger those systems, with potentially unpleasant consequences. An SSL connection makes that harder for them.
And it's a matter of principle: my web searches are nobody's business other than my own and my search engine's.
SSL will only protect against man-in-the-middle attacks;
SSL protects against eavesdropping.
Re:The real reason (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed, we all know that in a free market economy
Where?
It's what we'd all do if given the chance.
Speak for yourself.
Re:The real reason (Score:2, Insightful)
All useful sites offer complete SSL access, but I guess Google - as with IPv6 - gets to be congratulated when it makes a half hearted attempt to do what real technology pioneers have been doing for a good decade.
In other news, everything Apple's ever done is original.
Re:Security != privacy. (Score:2, Insightful)
Google has never shown any tendency towards abuse of my private data...Of course, they'll give that information to my government any old time, but that's not the same thing as having it continually logged where it can fire off triggers.
How do you know it's not being done automatically now? You don't.. My advice is simply to trust no one. The internet is a party line, any anybody can hear what you're doing. And government and corporation are the same. That's the way the majority wants it. The cool thing is that you can vote in a different government if you like. You don't have to vote for your spoon fed candidates if you don't want to. That means the problem is your friends and neighbors, not the government itself. It takes a bit more effort to drive a corporation into bankruptcy. Wall Street has turned that into a game of whack-a-mole.
The feature we really need (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The real reason (Score:1, Insightful)
Let's see. https://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]. No, redirects to http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]. I suppose Slashdot isn't a useful site.
Re:The real reason (Score:5, Insightful)
I see this also useful against Phorm, and other in-transit ad-insertion mechanisms.
All and all, the good guys benefit here. Google doesn't have ISPs modifying their ads in transit, replacing their ads with their own. The user gets search results that have not been tampered with (where a site for product "A" takes you to a different company, or associate IDs are replaced so different parties get credit for ad responses), and have potentially malicious ads thrown in. ISPs can't passively log the connection and sell the data (just like the parent said.)
Re:The real reason (Score:4, Insightful)
It is apparent that you don't like Google. That's fine. However, that is beside the point. What is important is that the connection between the Google user and Google is only belonging to those two. A third party can slow down or block the SSL transaction, but unless they jack a root CA, compromise one of the endpoints, or break one of the encryption algorithms, they are not going to be seeing what is going on.
To reiterate: Regardless of opinions of Google, this is a good thing. A search query with Google is my business and Google's business. Not the ISP's, not Phorm's, not a MITM watching the traffic go by. I'm sure as time goes on, less scrupulous ISPs will be slavering over ad revenue from in-transit ads.
Re:The real reason (Score:2, Insightful)
You can pay for a slashdot subscription for https access...
Re:It doesn't. (Score:4, Insightful)
actually, your browser will do this for you anyway:
RFC 2616, 15.1.3 [ietf.org]:
Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol.
Re:The real reason (Score:3, Insightful)
But from the PoV of storage and datamining, it's as much Google's business as it is Phorm's.
Uhm, no it isn't. You went to google to do a search. You didn't go anywhere else. Therefore, it isn't anyone else's business. And if you don't want google to have your search data, you can opt out of that by not using them at all. Phorm isn't even in the equation, they are interlopers. Encrypting the traffic cuts those types out completely. That way you only have Google to worry about.
Re:All HTTP traffic should be encrypted (Score:3, Insightful)
The real problem with allowing self-signed certs is that it means that https doesn't mean you're secure anymore.
Yes, technical users might be able to use them safely, but I wouldn't trust myself to be that attentive. Consider if I clear all my local browser state, or if I'm using a new computer and I go to my bank's web site. I've entered https so I think I'm safe. Do you think I'm going to notice the lack of a lock in the browser window? What about sites like facebook where I don't even see https, even though it's authenticated over https? For situations like these, the only warning you get that something is up is the self-signed cert problem.
Of course, with facebook, a mitm attack could remove all ssl and nobody would know, which is why it's a bad idea not to put your login page on ssl. However, for most users, simply seeing or typing https means "I'm secure." Allowing self-signed certs breaks that.
Re:The real reason (Score:3, Insightful)
No. Kids don't have instinctive responses to particular web pages
If you think this then you haven't dealt with many teenage kids.
adults who think that implied disgust and taking away of information are correct ways of providing education.
Who said anything about providing education?
I'm pretty anti-censorship and think that people should have access to whatever information they like. *However* I'm not crazy enough to believe that the very young are capable of dealing with all that information - they should only get access to some of it when they have matured to the point of being able to deal with it.
There are 3 things that kids need protecting against:
1. accidentally stumbling across content. Do you really want primary school kids accidentally stumbling across the likes of 2g1c? Plenty of adults find it quite traumatising, let alone kids who haven't been prepared through life experience.
2. intentionally finding content. Do you want kids to know how to set up their own drugs lab before they have the life experience to understand the consequences of drug use? Also, things like electronic bullying are real problems causing real harm.
3. distracting content. When kids are in lessons, they frequently do need access to the internet. But giving them access to the likes of facebook is really distracting (even employers have a problem with this, let alone schools!). There is a certain amount of policing that can be done by the teachers, but filtering systems help a lot.
Once they have the life experience to deal with this stuff then by all means, let them access it. If you, as a parent, disagree with this sort of censorship then you are well within your rights to allow your kids to access this content in their own time from home, but they certainly shouldn't be accessing it in school where they can inflict it on other kids, whose parents almost certainly disagree with you.
Re:It doesn't. (Score:1, Insightful)
You SHOULD look up the definition of SHOULD NOT in RFC language.