Re: Draft finding - "Transitioning the Web to HTTPS"

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 9:17 AM, Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com> wrote:

> protocols by which they are accessed. If we recommend that most or all
> resources be named with https-scheme names, then it becomes much harder to
> re-enable proxying should that later become desirable.

As I outlined in my response to the remote island problem, it will
still very much be able to re-enable proxying. But, the clients will
have to knowingly and intentionally trust the proxies.

We've seen what implicit trust has gotten us:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/01/eff-calls-immediate-action-defend-tunisian
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/10/verizon-wireless-injects-identifiers-link-its-users-to-web-requests/
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-farrell-perpass-attack-00

Middleboxes have to show honest value:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hildebrand-middlebox-erosion-01

> Whatever the final answer we choose, I we should remember that changes
> affecting the naming of resources have effects over decades, not just years.
> They are in that sense very hard to undo.

Exactly right. We are now trying to undo implicit trust of
untrustworthy middleboxes, because they threaten democracy. (Oh, and
they threaten business too. I'm more concerned about democracy
though.)

Received on Friday, 9 January 2015 18:42:04 UTC