- From: Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>
- Date: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 07:53:06 +0200
- To: Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie>
- Cc: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@gbiv.com>, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>, IETF HTTP WG <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 02:55:00AM +0100, Stephen Farrell wrote: > "Properly used, TLS provides good confidentiality The problem is precisely here. The mechanism is too complex for the casual web admin to deploy it correctly and to understand the implications of his choices. Not to mention the client side which is generally worse as soon as it's not a browser. TLS is only safe iff properly used and very few people know how to use it properly. Thus they deploy and feel safe, so they have nothing else to care about. The only really safe implementations I have seen were in clear text. Why ? Simply because their authors knew that a TLS deployment would eventually be degraded by clueless admins so they considered that they needed to have something robust even when TLS was broken. As a result they did all the job in the application (encrypting/signing sensible data, timestamping/signing HTTP headers) and the transport was as safe as a good TLS deployment without the risk that the transport would be degraded further. That's why I don't like promoting it as the easiest path to confidentiality. It's only one element but we tend too often to spread the word that it's sufficient, which is totally wrong and counter-productive. Willy
Received on Thursday, 19 September 2013 05:53:36 UTC