Topic: This forum was down for me for sometime (Read 1345 times)

There is, it's a bit long, but you can verify the certificate matches based on what theymos posts as the RSA modulus and exponent (65537). If you use Chrome, right click on the lock icon and go "Connection" to "Certificate Information", from there, click Details, Copy To File, Next, Base-64 encoded, Next, then save the file under somename.cer. Open somename.cer with a text editor, copy the text, then go to a site that will pull out the modulus from a certificate like this one:
https://certlogik.com/decoder/

Paste the text, click Decode, and then scroll down to the Modulus and Exponent. In this case you should see:

That should match the text of this theymos post or whichever future ones he provides.

The vast majority of people will never experience a Man-In-The-Middle attack to a website like bitcointalk.org, however there has been at least one occasion where someone attempted to compromise communication with the forum and changed a certificate (more specifically, the IP the name servers were pointing to, with a valid-looking certificate).


While this may work for now, he would need to remember to remove it if theymos switched hosts or changed IP addresses. The website may not always be hosted at the 109.201.133.195 IP. It may change to round-robin DNS or a new IP once the new forums are built or for any other reason. We may not always get a heads-up notification that the IP has changed, so it's never a good idea to hard code IPs unless you're doing it for development reasons, IMHO.

Well that's on your side. Your responsibility.

Other thing you could do is add this change to your hosts file:

This way you shouldn't be able to access the forums if the IP changes, but this is really not necessary. If something bad happens, theymos will post it and you'll be able to see what you can do to protect yourself.

Thats obvious, I was wondering if there is something else.

Btw, that message can also come if the clock is reset. Happened to me once and all the certificates became invalid.

If something like this happens:

What does it mean for normal users like me? All I have to do is to make sure that the site link is https://.... ?

For reference purposes, his last post on this is here.

It was apparently a short DoS attack. This kind of thing happens from time to time. It's nothing to worry about.

What you should worry about is if the HTTPS public key or IP address changes. I'll always post a PGP-signed announcement for such changes.

Unlikely when the admins are away for the holidays.

The forum gets flooded with DDoS attempts from time to time and theymos doesn't want to use any DDoS mitigation that will aid an attacker in MiTM'ing the forum so it's somewhat difficult to prevent.

There was apparently a glitch in the DNS switchover to the NSA-hosted servers. The good thing is that with the better new hardware there should be less downtime in the future.

Seriously though there usually would be an announcement if the site was compromised.

It happens to me once in a while

Were you able to connect to other websites though?

Was in the bath so didn't notice anything, but it's probably nothing to worry about changing your password over. I remember when this forum used to go down for 10-30 minutes at a time quite often but this is the first time in a very long time it has apparently happened.

I had also some issues nearly one hour ago. I hope it won't be down again.

also my pc down

The forum was down for me an hour ago. I was thought we might be getting the forum software upgrade! Apparently not.

I don't want to change before I receive any word. Anyone shouldn't be typing in any kind of password right now. I was logged in through cookie.

I've been having the same problems but for the last month or so. Donate page goes down, wiki stays up.

Actual good practice would be changing your password each month at least

Are you using any proxy ?

The worry was whether the site itself was under some trouble or if any data was compromised. Thinking I should change my password, but don't want to do that either before I know its secure again.