Re: New Version Notification for draft-thomson-http-encryption-00.txt

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In message <5551F31A.2000404@cs.tcd.ie>, Stephen Farrell writes:

>In other contexts, we've seen that people talk about use-cases
>for signing and even deploy signing, but verification can lag
>significantly behind, which can make the whole effort somewhat
>pointless.

Agree, there are plenty of wrecks in the road-side, but the other
side of that problem is that people end up rolling their own because
there is no standard.

I personally think this is the privacy area we should have focused
on, rather than the blunt weapon of "SSL-everywhere", because
this does not conflict with laws and disable caching to the same
degree.

However, it is not obvious to me that it is a good idea to involve
the Content-Encoding at all, whereas I see several downsides.

For instance we cannot Vary: on just the aesgcm-128 part of the C-E
header, and since the Encryption: header is just noise without the
qualifying C-E element, varying on just Encryption: is not a good
idea.

Leaving C-E entirely out of the picture will make no difference in
any scenario I can come up with (Please enlighten me if such scenarios
exist).

I think it would make much more sense to concentrate all the relevant
information in a single new header (Content-Encryption ?) which would
make Vary "just work".

This would also make the obvious "Accept-Encryption" negotiation
header possible.

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Received on Tuesday, 12 May 2015 12:56:47 UTC