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But I think another reason that I get particularly excited about Caddy is because to me Caddy is kind of the poster child for how awesome and easy it is to do something in Go. When you look at the features that Caddy has and then you look at the Caddy code base, the code base isn't as big as you would expect it to be a... |
**Matt Holt:** Yeah, I think it's a good showcase for some of Go's capabilities, at least the web and maybe some of its crypto portion, super easy to do things. Most people and most Go developers don't really need Caddy if they just need to serve static files; Go makes that one or two lines, and it's so easy. Use Caddy... |
But it's a really good showcase for these people who come from Node or Python or PHP environments and they're working a lot in those languages, to use something like Caddy is a breath of fresh air for them from what I've heard. Because they're used to installing runtime environments and dependencies and setting up proc... |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think even from using it as a customer kind of perspective, we serve the GopherCon and GopherAcademy sites using it. Some of the stuff just makes it so easy, like the Let's Encrypt functionality; it's just easy to get certificates. |
**Matt Holt:** Yeah, and Caddy is designed to be -- if you're familiar with web servers like Apache or Nginx, you configure a web server. With Caddy when you configure it you don't think about servers so much, you think about sites. You can think of it this way, every 10 years or so, a new layer or abstraction comes al... |
\[\\00:08:08.18\] For example, recently we're seeing chat bots that are emerging on top of messaging platforms. And so you might view those chat bots as kind of another layer of abstraction on top of another technology, the messaging protocols. And in a way, I think, in a similar way Caddy is that layer above the web l... |
So again, its ability to render markdown as HTML on the fly is something that is really helpful and productive for site owners these days, but that's a layer above the web server. I'm hoping that we can step up from just worrying about the web layer and focus on your sites and what you wanna get done as a site owner. D... |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** It makes a lot of sense, yeah. |
**Matt Holt:** So all the security stuff is just taken care of, because that's the layer below your site; all the TLS stuff - you don't have to worry about it so much. And features available to you like Markdown or Abiola's Git plugin that allows you to deploy your site with the git-push, that kind of builds upon an ex... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Yeah, that was the biggest appeal for me once we started playing the hugo-plugin with the git-plugin. It replaced a ton of ugly workflow that I had previously. Every time we did an update to the GopherCon site or we made a new blog post on blog.gopheracademy.com, that was minutes of work that I coul... |
**Matt Holt:** Cool, yeah. I hope there will be more plugins with time. |
**Erik St. Martin:** There was one I remember seeing that was WebSockets, where you kind of balance STDIN and STDOUT to a Web Socket. |
**Matt Holt:** Yeah. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I'm interested to see some use cases there, but I thought that was kind of interesting. |
**Matt Holt:** Yeah, that was inspired from a project called WebsocketD, which is devoted to doing just that… |
**Erik St. Martin:** Okay. |
**Matt Holt:** …which is also written in Go. Pretty cool project. |
**Erik St. Martin:** See this goes to that -- who claimed it? Somebody named it Ketelsen's Law. \[Laughter\] Somebody just this afternoon called that Ketelsen's Law, the whole everything interesting in the web world. |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I think that might have been Scott Mansfield. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah. Brian said it on the show a long time ago and someone claimed it as Ketelsen's Law. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I also said that the whole Internet is being rewritten in Go, so you can quote me on that \[laughs\]. |
**Erik St. Martin:** It seems that way. Have you looked at any stats to see how many websites are running Caddy these days? |
**Matt Holt:** No, I don't know where to get that information. I mean, reliably. A lot of people that are security-conscious will hide the server header, and it doesn't phone home. I know that there is an estimated 30,000 downloads, but that doesn't include any that are automated installs from scripts. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Right. It'd be interesting to see... But for a lot of us, it's just so easy to just get up and going. And like I said, one of my favorite things is the kind of Let's Encrypt in SNI support. |
**Matt Holt:** \[11:51\] Yeah, we should talk about that, because there's no reason that only Caddy can do this. I think every Go program that uses the network should do this, for a number of reasons. Well, Brian, you write a lot of network software, do you think about this? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** At Backplane we do distributed load balancing and we definitely think about it, and we use Let's Encrypt to get certificates for all of our clients; so yes, we think about it a lot. |
**Matt Holt:** Cool. How do you do that? |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I didn't write it, I don't know. Magic happens... Anthony wrote it, Anthony Voutas. |
**Matt Holt:** That's good. I guess the reason I ask is because... So Let's Encrypt is a service that lets you get free TLS certificates, and the thing is that it's an automated service, so you don't point-and-click your way through a checkout form and then check your email and click a link, download a certificate and ... |
You know, it's interesting because I was talking to some people, and some people dispute the need for it, saying their application, in their use case they don't TLS at all. Others are saying that -- actually I was just talking to someone, a project or a team leader at a large organization here recently, and he was extr... |
**Carlisia Thompson:** But when you say skeptical in the case of this person, do you mean in terms of how much security it is actually adding, or what exactly? |
**Erik St. Martin:** I think in this case you're referring to whether the Let's Encrypt organization can be kind of trusted with being a root CA. Is that what you're referring to, and not necessarily the security of TLS itself? |
**Matt Holt:** For that particular person, yeah, it was the legitimacy of Let's Encrypt, but I've seen conversations all over the board, from "Their certificates are not secure, for some reason" to "TLS is broken, in general" to "Let's Encrypt is not a long-lived organization", or something. And all of these claims or ... |
Is TLS broken? If you do it wrong, yes, it's broken. But the current modern standards are pretty good, and with TLS 1.3 coming out, there is one or two concerns about it, but it's not finalized yet, but TLS 1.3 looks really promising, as well. |
If you have a problem with TLS, it's probably more due to the problems with PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). No, PKI isn't perfect, but it's pretty good what we've got right now. So for you to assume that your transport is already secure is a really big claim, and I think that only few use cases can really make that cl... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I'd go out on a limb and say that anybody who thinks their transport layer is secure is probably deluding themselves. There is no secure network anywhere. |
**Matt Holt:** \[15:50\] So one exception perhaps is the loopback interface. Your loopback interface is probably safe without TLS. |
**Erik St. Martin:** Yeah, the loopback probably is, and even though I wouldn't do this at Comcast, I know at least for the cable side they have their own backbones and private internet. And that's, of course, segregated from other networks. It's like -- I think in some cases there, but still, there's multiple... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** I'm gonna argue. |
**Erik St. Martin:** I'm not advocating that you don't encrypt there, but it is kind of one of those, "You know, depending on the service and how well...", but I think it's just a good idea to use TLS in general. I mean, thinking about things like Kubernetes and all those that's using TLS in between all of the services... |
And a lot of reason why people avoided it before is getting certificates or stuff, and wildcard certificates and installing these things, it was really time-consuming and most of the time people were generating their own certificates and then you'd have to set up your applications to trust them or just use insecure, an... |
**Erik St. Martin:** They are, Brian. I'm gonna beat that dead horse. They are. |
**Matt Holt:** Assume they are. If you believe your transport layer is secure, you need to kind of guarantee four things: integrity, confidentiality, nonrepudiation at a technical level at least, and authentication, of course. You need to know who you're talking to. So confidentiality is obvious. You don't want people ... |
Then you've got authentication, so you need to make sure that each machine knows who they're talking to. Again, if you can trust your network hardware and all the other software that interacts with your network, maybe you have that covered. |
Integrity is one that people often forget. If they have a site or service that they say, "Oh, there is no private information here. There is no sensitive information. I don't need TLS.", that's false because your application will break if it gets malformed data probably, or your website is a liability if you're display... |
And then nonrepudiation is more complicated, but at a technical level it basically means that the use of a private key has been invoked, so that the parties who are involved in this authenticated transmission, they have proved -- they can't deny that they were part of it. Now again, at the technical level that's true, ... |
**Brian Ketelsen:** Use TLS. |
**Carlisia Thompson:** I was gonna ask earlier, for the people who do want to use TLS, what are the things that people need to watch out for? I also wanted to ask you - and I'm trying not to jumble a lot of questions in one sentence - to talk about the ACME protocol. Because apparently Let's Encrypt is one entity, and ... |
**Matt Holt:** \[19:54\] Okay. Yeah, great question. The first question was what should you watch out for if you're using TLS - is that what you asked? |
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