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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that one of the primary developers of FreeBSD does not understand one of the two major use cases for SSL, namely identity assurance. News sites and local governments don't care about privacy when transmitting news or emergency information, true, but citizens should be concerned about making sure that information is coming from who they think it's coming from.

I'm no fan of HTTP/2, but this article does not effectively argue against it. Too many bare assertions without any meat to them. And when you fail to mention a major purpose of a protocol (SSL) you dismiss as useless, you lose a lot of credibility.

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SSL does not provide identity assurance (=authentication), the CA-cabal does, SSL just does the necessary math for you.

CA's are trojaned, that's documented over and over by bogus certs in the wild, so in practice you have no authentication when it comes down to it.

Authentication is probably the hardest thing for us, as citizens to get, because all the intelligence agencies of the world will attempt to trojan it.

Secrecy on the other hand, we can have that trivially with self-signed certs, but for some reason browsers treat those as if they were carriers of Ebola.

That's an argument against showing scary warnings on self-signed certs, not against SSL. It would be nice if there was a httpr:// scheme that would be like HTTPS but without certificate checking.

I'm not arguing against SSL.

I'm arguing against making SSL mandatory, because that will force NSA to break it so they can do their work, and then we will have nothing to protect our privacy.

More encryption is not a solution to a political problem: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2508864

... Seriously? The NSA is just sitting around, unable to commit resources to breaking TLS because it's not widespread enough? But HTTP2 is suddenly gonna make the NSA say "alright, we'll break it now. We didn't want to break the most widely deployed crypto protocol, but now we jusT have to make huge crypto breakthroughs, sigh".

It's bizarre to think if the NSA could break TLS they're holding back.

> I'm arguing against making SSL mandatory, because that will force NSA to break it so they can do their work, and then we will have nothing to protect our privacy.

That line of reasoning sounds bizarre to me. It sounds like "don't add a lock to your door, because that will force the criminals to break the lock, and then your door will be unlocked".

A bad analogy is like a wet screwdriver.

Try this one, it's better, but not perfect:

Imagine what happened if some cheap invention turned all buildings into inpenetrable fortresses unless you had a key for the lock.

Now police can not execute a valid judge-sanctioned search warrant.

How long time do you think lawmakers will take to react ?

You were talking about the NSA breaking SSL, not lawmakers forbidding it.

If the problem is with the analogy, without analogies this time:

> I'm arguing against making SSL mandatory, because that will force NSA to break it so they can do their work, and then we will have nothing to protect our privacy.

Without SSL, our privacy is unprotected, since eavesdroppers can read our traffic. Now add SSL, and eavesdroppers cannot read the traffic. Then NSA breaks it, and eavesdroppers can read our traffic again - we've just circled back to the beginning. We will have nothing to protect our privacy, but we already had nothing to protect our privacy before we added SSL; and in the meantime before the NSA breaks it, we had privacy.

And it assumes that the NSA will be able to break it, and that the NSA is the only attacker which matters.

NSA does what the do because lawmakers told them to and gave them the money -- you cannot separate these two sides of the problem.

There are many ways to break SSL, the easiest, cheapest and most in tune with the present progression towards police-states is to legislate key-escrow.

Google "al gore clipper chip" if you don't think that is a real risk.

The more important sites have user credentials that should be secret, and therefore have to use SSL anyway, so NSA will do their best to break it anyway.

I would have found your comment rather more useful had you led with the technical point rather than an attack on the author.

I don't understand. I did not attack the author, and describing the purpose of SSL is a technical point.

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