Re: IAB Statement on Internet Confidentiality

There is no known technology that covers all use cases and security issues of http. Arguing that tech X is bad because of attack vector Y, is always possible for a significant amount (I think almost all) of use cases.

A discussion has to take the use case first, investigate threats vs. risks and find the most suitable tech. Therefore, differentiation between "browsing the net" and "connecting to a local ip" is helpful.

Discussing mandatory security tech for all uses of http is not. There are more use cases than all of us know combined. If h2 should be a successor of http, forcing tls is not feasible in practise.

I think almost all of us know this use case:
- I myself need a browser that allows me to accept "invalid" security. By choice.
- My mother *should not* have a browser that ever does that, nor should she ever be asked to.
- It would be great if my mother could connect to the DSL box and tell me what possible error she sees there. With a browser that she knows.
- Installing self-signed certs beforehand on all involved systems/trust stores that do not expire before I need them is mission impossible.

//Stefan

> Am 18.11.2014 um 09:11 schrieb Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>:
> 
> --------
> 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.
> 

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Received on Tuesday, 18 November 2014 10:06:44 UTC