- From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
- Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2017 21:26:25 +0000
- To: Kari Hurtta <hurtta-ietf@elmme-mailer.org>
- cc: Alex Rousskov <rousskov@measurement-factory.com>, HTTP working group mailing list <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
-------- In message <20170228200936.C5AB71F5E9@welho-filter3.welho.com>, Kari Hurtta writes: >Yes, this looks like common sense. And still no one browser does that. I think common sense can be summarized as follows: 1. If any proxy is involved, both the client and server should know that, so that they can judge for themselves to what extent they want to trust the proxy. 2. A legitimate proxy has no reason to try hide its own existence or to deliberately reduce the security, privacy or integrity of the communication, beyond what is required for doing its job. 3. It should be as hard as possible to insert and hide an ilegitimate proxy (=MITM attack) which undetected can impact security, privacy or integrity of the communication. On the client side the only politically reasonable and neutral solution is to announce the precense of a proxy by inserting a prominent identification of it above the address bar, so that the user sees: BIGCORP Inc. Proxy (Contact IT/Bill x1234) inspects this connection https://mybank.com/ Or as it may be: ELBONIA Government National & Child safety Proxy inspects this connection http://bikeshed.org The "proxybar" should be suitably decorated to indicate if the connection to the proxy has any kind of privacy and if there is any reason to think that the proxy really is who it claims to be. The current "political" stance by the user agents means that literally millions of people are behind proxies, legitimate and ilegitimate, without knowing it or being able to see it, without significant X.509-skillz. As for the political fight for a fundamental human right to privacy: More people would probably pay attention, if they could clearly see who tried to mess with their communication. -- 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.
Received on Tuesday, 28 February 2017 21:27:19 UTC