Michael Diederich wrote:
<begin name="Timwi" date="Friday 09
July 2004 23:55"/>
did some
think about an secure web implentation? When https would be
offered, i (and i am sure other also) would prefer it. :)
Do you mean the entire site? Do you mean you want to be able to submit
edits completely anonymously?
I can understand someone wanting complete anonymity if they're editing a
controversial or sensitive topic, but isn't HTTPS a little bit overkill?
Well, sniffing of passwords and user accounts is not so difficult, and i am
often in unsecure networks with my notebook. It is not about sensitive
topics - it is about the secure of the accounts.
Are you asking about Wikipedia in specific or on MediaWiki in general?
MediaWiki in general should work fine over HTTPS. If it doesn't, please
send patches.
For Wikipedia, we briefly discussed the possibility a couple years ago
but were stymied by the nasty virtual server problem: basically, HTTPS
and name-based virtual servers don't mix.
In order to determine which hostname & configuration to use, the web
server needs the Host: header sent by the client. BUT, before we get
there an encrypted connection has to be set up. BUT, the certificate is
verified based on the hostname. BUT, we don't know which hostname to use
yet.
D'oh!
A possible way around this is to rearrange everything to different paths
on a single hostname, but this could be a big pain in the ass. Further,
maintaining two different sets of paths or URLs might be a problem for
[parser] cache consistency.
Additionally there's the issue that any HTTPS access won't be cached at
the squid level (or perhaps even the client level); if we restrict this
to logins only (perhaps even optionally) then this oughtn't to impact
performance too much.
Further there's the certificate issue; would we be content with a
self-signed certificate (BIG WARNINGS in your browser every time you
login) or will we spend the foundation's money for a big fancy
corporation's stamp of approval?
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)