[aur-general] Securing the AUR website

[Philipp Überbacher]

Excerpts from Lukas Fleischer's message of 2011-08-06 12:14:14 +0200:
> On Sat, Aug 06, 2011 at 11:10:48AM +0200, Pierre Schmitz wrote:
> > On Sat, 6 Aug 2011 02:29:13 +0200, Lukas Fleischer wrote:
> > > Agreed. I'm still against completely disabling HTTP. We will use HTTPs
> > > for all links by default so there shouldn't be any users unintentionally
> > > pasting HTTP links anywhere. Malicious links might still be an issue but
> > > observant users should be aware of that. And using secure cookies should
> > > fix that, anyway.
> > 
> > I didn't tell to disable HTTP. Of course you add a redirect there and
> > you might even add the HSTS header. It's not only about links, also
> > people will just typoe in "aur.archlinux.org" into their browser bar and
> > that will open http by default.
> 
> Well, "Redirect all http traffic to https by default" sounded to me like
> disabling plain HTTP. Perhaps I took this too literally.
> 
> > 
> > Anyway, I see I am talking to walls here. Sometimes I wonder why there
> > is so much resistance against encryption. One would think it was the
> > other way round. 
> 
> Again, and I'm not going to repeat this... I am not against enabling
> encryption and I am not against making it the default. All I said is
> that we shouldn't turn down HTTP.

I sadly followed this discussion only remotely when it was ongoing, so I
have to ask: The agreed upon solution for now is to default to http and
only allow login from https? At least that's how it is at the moment and
the http default feels a bit weird to me. When I can only log in with
https I get the feeling I should use https and wonder why it isn't the
default. I had a look at other parts of the Arch Linux website as well,
here's an overview of the defaults:

archlinux.org       -> http     -> no login anyway
bbs.archlinux.org   -> https    -> separate login page
wiki.archlinux.org  -> https    -> separate login page
bugs.archlinux.org  -> https    -> login on main page
aur.archlinux.org   -> http     -> login on main page

As you can see, AUR is the fish out of water here, login is on the
arrival page, but you can't log in by default. I'm sorry to make the
suggestion this late, but I'd vote for https as default for AUR.

Best regards,
Philipp