Re: Trusted proxy UI strawman

Hi Martin,

Thanks for taking a look.

"is the decision to accept the proxy a blocking one? That is, is the user able to use the Web prior to making this decision?"

Sorry if the presentation was not clear but the proxy is deployed inline so the user has no choice on whether or not the proxy will be able to process his/her bits. The question is whether or not the user wants to give the proxy consent to decrypt the TLS-encrypted bits. This is done by first importing the trusted proxy certificate, which is an identical process to importing a root certificate today. In fact I'd argue the proposed trusted proxy import dialog is more clear to the user that he/she is in fact allowing the proxy to decrypt and alter traffic than the root certificate import dialog is today.

"https://bankofamerica.com/ might be a bad choice of example, though I'm guessing that you chose a banking site intentionally. Personally, I find the idea that there is a MitM on a connection to my bank to be almost as disturbing as having my visit to a doctor monitored."

Yes. We intentionally showed a banking site because that might be one where many users decide to opt out of trusting the proxy, which is what is being demonstrated in that screenshot. Again, it's important to note that if the user had imported a root certificate he/she would see no notification when browsing to an https banking site and would not be prompted to opt out.

The whole idea of this proposal is to make it no different than today's MITM except for the fact that the user is made aware of the decryption and is able to opt out on a per site or on a global basis by either uninstalling the trusted proxy certificate or going to the browser settings and turning it off.

Thanks,

Peter


On Jun 15, 2014, at 2:25 PM, Martin Thomson <martin.thomson@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On 14 June 2014 17:02, <bizzbyster@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I agree. Here's a straw man to get the discussion going:
> > http://caffeinatetheweb.com/presentations/trusted_proxy.html.
> 
> I have a lot of questions, but I'll start with this one: is the decision to accept the proxy a blocking one? That is, is the user able to use the Web prior to making this decision? That makes a very big difference.
> 
> I also have a few things that you might like to think about:
> 
> https://bankofamerica.com/ might be a bad choice of example, though I'm guessing that you chose a banking site intentionally. Personally, I find the idea that there is a MitM on a connection to my bank to be almost as disturbing as having my visit to a doctor monitored.
> 
> This sort of work might not be in scope here. I understand that we need to have this discussion somewhere, but the IETF (and even the W3C) have so far avoided dealing with these sorts of issues. That's probably not the right answer, but I keep hearing that this is outside their area of expertise.
>