It's nice to start over on Masto. When someone you haven't thought of in ages follows you it's a chance to think about them again. Which is often nice.
@davew Have you been able to figure out why your Mastodon profile link to Scripting.com isn’t “verified” yet? I’m looking at Scripting.com’s HTML and I don’t see why it isn’t working. I saw you were looking into this the other day.
@gruber @davew HTTPS links are required for verification, per the official docs at https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/profile/
Setting up your profile - Mastodon documentation

Get started with your new account.

@codejake @gruber — that explains it. Thanks.
@davew @codejake That was actually going to be my guess! Kinda sucks IMO. There’s no reason to require HTTPS for this.

@davew @gruber @codejake

@Gargron any chance the HTTPS requirement for verification can be lifted?

@cdevroe @davew @gruber @Gargron No, don’t lift the HTTPS requirement. It’s important and it was put there for a reason.

Eliminating the HTTPS requirement opens it to various spoofing and security shenanigans.

@codejake @davew @gruber @Gargron I'm curious how this could be done. Do you know of some documentation that I could look at?

@cdevroe For spoofing attacks, start here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack

Now, when you bring this up to most IT pros, they'll say "But, that's so unlikely, and the attacker has to be in a special place on the network.".

But these attacks can take place anywhere along the chain, from browser extensions to on-the-wire to caching, to CDN, to destination infra.

There's also another class of attacks it prevents, but it's complicated, I'm on vacation, and it won't fit in a toot anyway. 😄

Man-in-the-middle attack - Wikipedia

@cdevroe @davew @gruber Again, you have to think about the whole chain for attacks. And don't think Dave, think heads of states and F500 corps.

Here's how I'd actually MITM it for my 40,000 users on our network equipment. (and yeah, there's a CSS spacing bug for the forwarded server.).

Then, on evilserver.org, I'd have some code that met my goals.

You would do something similar to attack different points in the chain, depending on what your exact goals and jail time tolerances were.

@codejake It just so happens that my jail time tolerance is something less than zero. Thanks for the follow-up. Fascinating.

@cdevroe @codejake

please take me off the cc list. thanks.