Re: IAB Statement on Internet Confidentiality

--------
In message <CABkgnnVWze4YVTfgVc-+9DRTgGdG86xmHbySB=g2uDoyvQ_S=w@mail.gmail.com>
, Martin Thomson writes:

>> Even better would be to support anonymous ECDH. Why bother requiring all
>of these fake certs to be generated when they have no legit purpose.
>
>That at least is an easy one to answer. If your handshake looks different
>(and any anonymous mode will, unless you use TLS 1.3 and some aggressive
>padding), then you open an invitation to MitM. 

This is exactly the kind of crap-think I tried to warn against in
my FOSDEM keynote:

The point was *not* to defend against MitM but pervasive monitoring.

Your attitude there, shared by far too many TLS-heads is like the
parents who forego child immunisations, because their kids might
feel unwell for a couple of days afterwards.

ECDH would do *wonders* against pervasive monitoring, it would render
almost all of NSAs take worthless to them, and you cannot do a MitM
with a passive splitter.

It's the same stupid attitude which makes browsers treat self-signed
certs as radioactive waste.

That attitude, is a BIG part of the problem, and contributes nothing
to the solution for pervasive monitoring.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2014 08:11:59 UTC