Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

I wish the world would adopt tcpcrypt. SSL provides two services, encryption, and authentication.

tcpcrypt just does the encryption part. Once the connection is established, userspace on both sides can invoke an ioctl that provides a session nonce. If the nonce matches on both sides, the connection is not man-in-the-middled. It’s easy to confirm the nonce matches: Both sides sign it and send it to the other party.

This has two big advantages:

(1) operating systems can opportunistically encrypt traffic for unmodified legacy applications and network protocols, allowing the endpoints to detect mass surveillance without requiring any certificates.

(2) Like newer versions of SSL, it encrypts the information currently sent in cleartext in the SNI, preventing the type of censorship in the article.

That would still rely on

A) some kind of secret that only the server knows that the client can verify in order to ensure it's not trading nonces with the MITM.

B) A way for the client to ensure that the nonce isn't being passed through a second tcpcrypt session between the MITM and the server with the connection being in cleartext between the 2 tcpcrypt streams.

Currently the best supported method of implementing both A and B is certificates, which means you may as well use TLS.

> which means you may as well use TLS

Even if you don't authenticate at all, it makes it much more expensive to intercept all these connections.

And TLS lacks a way to automatically apply it to all connections.

Also I don't understand what scenario you're outlining with B.

Client <-> Evil Middlebox <-> Real Web Server

Client establishes a tcpcrypt session with what it thinks is Real Web Server but is actually Evil Middlebox replaying the request to the server and the response back to the client.

Oh so A and B are describing the same scenario, okay.

Yeah, I'm not sure what the parent was getting at separating them out since from the clients perspective they're the same. I guess they mean that getting a tcpcrypt connection on your server isn't a guarantee that there isn't a middlebox either.

They were alternative ways to prevent a MITM, but they both have solutions solved by existing TLS.

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