Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"HTTP/2.0 could have done away with cookies, replacing them instead with a client controlled session identifier."

It doesn't make much sense to get rid of cookies alone, not when there are multiple ways of storing stuff in a user's browser, let alone for fingerprinting - http://samy.pl/evercookie/

Getting rid of cookies doesn't really help with privacy at this point and just wait until IPv6 becomes more widespread. Speaking of which, that EU requirement is totally stupid.

The author also makes the mistake of thinking that we need privacy protections only from the NSA or other global threats. That's not true, we also need privacy protections against local threats, such as your friendly local Internet provider, that can snoop in on your traffic and even inject their own content into the web pages served. I've seen this practice several times, especially on open wifi networks. TLS/SSL isn't relevant only for authentication security, but also for ensuring that the content you receive is the content that you asked for. It's also useful for preventing middle-men from seeing your traffic, such as your friendly network admin at the company you're working for.

For example if I open this web page with plain HTTP, a middle-man can see that I'm reading a rant on HTTP/2.0, instead of seeing just a connection to queue.acm.org. From this it can immediately build a useful profile for me, because only somebody with software engineering skills would know about HTTP, let alone read a rant on IETF's handling of version 2.0. It could also inject content, such as ads or a piece of Javascript that tracks my movement or whatever. So what's that line about "many HTTP applications have no need for [SSL]" doing in a rant lamenting on privacy?

HTTP/2.0 probably has flaws, but this article is a rant about privacy and I feel that it gets it wrong, as requiring encrypted connections is the thing that I personally like about HTTP/2.0 or SPDY. Having TLS/SSL everywhere would also make it more costly for the likes of NSA to do mass surveillance of user's traffic, so it would have benefits against global threats as well.

Actually, getting rid of cookies would fit almost all HTTP requests into a single packet, so there are tangible technical benefits, even without the privacy benefits.

You seem confused about cryptography.

Against NSA we only need secrecy, privacy is not required.

Likewise integrity does not require secrecy, but authentication (which doesn't require secrecy either).

You don't think that anybody can figure out what you are doing when you open a TCP connection to queue.acm.org right after they posted a new article, even if that connection is encrypted ? Really ? How stupid do you think NSA is ?

Have you never heard of meta-data collection ?

And if you like your encrypted connections so much, you should review at the certs built into your browser: That's who you trust.

I'll argue that's not materially better than unencrypted HTTP.

(See also Operation Orchestra, I don't think you perceive the scale of what NSA is doing)

The line on secrecy vs privacy doesn't make sense. Actually help me out, because I'm not a native English speaker - if you're implying that the NSA should be able to snoop in on my traffic without a warrant, as long as it keeps it secret, then I beg to differ.

Visiting an article doesn't happen only after it was posted. And surely the NSA can certainly figure out ways to track you, but their cost will be higher. Just like with fancy door locks and alarm systems, making it harder for thieves to break in means the probability of it happening drops. Imperfect solutions are still way better than no protections at all (common fallacy nr 1).

All such rants are also ignoring that local threats are much more immediate and relevant than the NSA (common fallacy nr 2).

On trusting the certificate authorities built into my browser, of course, but then again this is a client-side issue, not one that can be fixed by HTTP 2.0 and we do have certificate pinning and even alternatives championed by means of browser add-ons. Against the NSA, nothing is perfect of course, unless you're doing client-side PGP encryption on a machine not connected to the Internet. But then again, that's unrelated to the topic of HTTP/2.0.

With unencrypted HTTP, NSA can just grab the packets on the fiber and search for any keyword they want.

With a self-signed cert they would have to do a Man In The Middle attack on you to see your traffic.

They don't have the capacity (or ability! man of their fibertaps are passive) to do that to all the traffic at all the time.

The problem with making a CA-blessed cert a requirement for all or even most of the traffic, is that it forces the NSA to break SSL/TLS or CAs definitively, otherwise they cannot do their job.

Fundamentally this is a political problem, just slapping encryption on traffic will not solve it.

But it can shift the economy of the situation -- but you should think carefully what way you shift it.

> The problem with making a CA-blessed cert a requirement for all or even most of the traffic, is that it forces the NSA to break SSL/TLS or CAs definitively, otherwise they cannot do their job.

Isn't the whole point of pervasive authenticated encryption to prevent the NSA from "doing their job" (at least the spying part of it)?

> But it can shift the economy of the situation -- but you should think carefully what way you shift it.

It shifts more than the economy of the situation. It also forces a shift from passive attacks to active attacks, which are easier to detect and harder to justify. Forcing the attacker to justify their acts has a political effect.

> Forcing the attacker to justify their acts has a political effect.

Which essentially means that terrorists and pedophiles are gonna be using encryption to harm the kids and browsers will have to obey to a new wonderful kids-protecting law and add a backdoor.

Pervasive authenticated encryption will not prevent the NSA from doing their job, as long as lawmakers think they should do their job.

Instead you will see key-escrow laws or even bans on encryption.

You cannot solve the political problem by applying encryption.

Laws against encryption will never be international. In the US it happened before [1], so there is indeed precedent. But such laws prevent a country from being competitive in the international marketplace, therefore many countries will not agree to it, just as they aren't agreeing with IP laws. And yes, I also believe that this trend on having national firewalls for censoring content will also not last for long, for the same reason.

What I love about technology is that it cannot be stopped with lawmaking.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the...

The historical evidence that technology cannot be stopped by lawmakers is very weak, if it even exists in the first place.

Very few lawmakers have really tried, and few technologies have been worth it in the first place.

The relevant question is probably if technology can be delayed by lawmaking and how long time.

There is no doubt however that policies can be changed, most places it just takes elections but a few places may need a revolution.

Thinking this is a problem you can solve by rolling out SSL or TLS is incredibly naive.

> Instead you will see key-escrow laws or even bans on encryption.

That's a defeatist attitude: "we can't win, so let's not even try".

It's not guaranteed that pervasive authenticated encryption will lead to key-escrow laws or bans on encryption. In fact, the more common authenticated encryption is, the harder is to pass laws against it.

As an example, consider how common encrypted wireless networks are nowadays. A blanket ban on encryption would be opposed by many of the wireless network owners. And that's only one use of encryption.

Key escrow has the extra problem of being both costly and very complex to implement correctly.

No, I'm not saying "lets not even try", I'm saying "Lets try with the right tools for the job: Voting ballots."

In the meantime we should not cripple our protocols, hoping that the NSA will go "aahh shucks!" and close shop, when the law clearly tells them to "Collect everything."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com