On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 4:36 PM, David Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 1) The admin of the webserver wants to enable encryption
> 2) The user has a browser that supports encryption

Correct.

> But both of those conditions are *already* met by HTTPS.  Can you
> explain the scenario this is intended to cover that isn't already
> covered by HTTPS?

> Basically, generation 1 of Obfuscated TCP seemed sensible: upgrade the
> OS on both the client and server machine (or on both sides of the p2p
> connection) and all TCP connections get magically encrypted.  I can see
> the differentiating value of that.  But I don't the differentiation
> here, especially given that it doesn't address the P2P case.

I'll agree that the probably the value of the system has decreased as
the generations progressed. This makes me sad, but I haven't stopped
trying.

(Although there are advantages to moving out of kernel space however)

The aim is to increase the currently tiny amount of encrypted traffic
over the Internet. HTTPS has ubiquitous support, and yet it's just not
used. There are several reasons why not:
  * Getting a certificate isn't too hard, but it's still quite a speed
bump. They cost and they have to be renewed. Self-signed certs are
possible, but I support Firefox in its efforts to discourage them. I
don't think we can present to the average user any shades of gray.
HTTPS should be the gold standard and everything else should be
suspect.
  * Users just don't type HTTPS most of the time. Yea, you can
redirect, but the latency (another 3 RTT) is a real pain.
  * Hosting sites can't deploy HTTPS for their clients by default,
because of the certificate issues.
  * HTTPS is expensive to serve. Partly that's due to the default
configuration of OpenSSL which ends up using astronomically expensive
suites like DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA, partly because TLS is aiming higher.

I would dearly like the deployment for servers to be easier. That can
be done with connection memory, although it suffers from mild privacy
concerns (you need to keep a hash of the hostnames that you visit in
the browser) and that the first connection isn't secure. The code to
do this is already written, just disabled at the moment.

In addition to the ObsTCP information in the DNS advert, I also want
to support a TLS port so that browsers will transparently use TLS and
will accept self signed certs without comment when they do. That may
turn out to be more useful since people don't have to patch their
servers.



Cheers

AGL

-- 
Adam Langley [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.imperialviolet.org
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