Re: Adding Security Considerations regarding interception to p1

I don't like the proposed text at all. It proposes TLS as sole and
efficient means to protect privacy. That's wrong for different reason:

- TLS does not help against collecting and analyzing connection
  data, which is an important and dangerous part of the actions of
  governmental surveillance organizations.

- TLS does not help against data collection conducted by providers of
  internet services, which is an equal important threat to end user's
  privacy.

- The text only considers passive interception and man in the middle
  attacks and claims that TLS can mitigate the danger. It does not deal
  with MITM attacks on TLS-traffic which is known to happen. It ignores
  that TLS (at the moment) completely depends on the trustworthiness of
  CAs. But there is nobody who could tell for sure that these CAs are
  trustworthy. Quite the contrary. We have learned recently that even
  big companies seem to be quite defenseless when governments request
  their users data.

- It only comes up with proposals what servers should do. But it would
  be even more important to talk about what end users can do and what
  vendors of HTTP-clients should do to help end users in this (and
  what most browser vendors don't).

Discussion of security threats and measures against them is important.
But it should be done seriously. Ritually promoting the
one-size-fits-none security of TLS does not help.

Werner

Received on Wednesday, 18 September 2013 18:24:49 UTC