Bill--We believe it isn't a binary choice between maximizing public Internet 
security and minimizing enterprise risk.  I am not advocating for a particular 
solution but if social media chooses to use PFS only that is fine with us and 
likely we would use PFS is many public Internet situations as well.  

That said, at least one of the sites you mentioned was known to have an APT 
inside their perimeter (Operation Aurora) for about a month and part of the 
tactics within that attack which was publicly reported was the use of "SSL" to 
mask C&C communications.  That's the type of threat we are concerned about 
inside of the enterprise network and we need visibility (and flexibility 
appropriate to our network design and risk tolerance) to solve for these issues 
in way that protects people like the ones you mentioned.  

End-point monitoring while useful has a lot of limitations:  logging issues, 
often can't meet packet capture requirements, etc.  We are not against 
end-point monitoring and do consider it a tool in the toolkit but it simply 
can't adequately replace robust network security monitoring tools.  

- Andrew 



-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Frantz [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Friday, September 23, 2016 9:31 PM
To: BITS Security <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [TLS] Industry Concerns about TLS 1.3

On 9/23/16 at 2:24 PM, [email protected] (BITS
Security) wrote:

>But general-purpose messaging services (and other collaboration
>services) which don’t have an explicit man-in-the-middle (and don’t 
>permit server-side access to user plaintext and can’t be observed by 
>other means) can’t be used in supervised environments. This rules out 
>many cloud-hosted services today.

I see a train wreck coming and it looks like this:

The public internet, Google, Cloud services, Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc. move 
in the direction of improving security using things like PFS, because the idea 
of protecting human rights advocates in the parts of the world where people are 
routinely tortured sells well to the general public, people like me, and others 
on this list.

On the other hand, some major enterprises continue to depend on being able to 
break the security of their employees to monitor their networks in ways that 
the bad guys can easily use, as opposed to installing endpoint or gateway 
monitoring.

This train wreck results in fewer and fewer public internet services being 
available to users within these enterprises. 
Eventually, employees give up on the corporate network and start using their 
cell phones to communicate with customers, research investments etc., 
completely bypassing the regulatory required monitoring.

This scenario says it doesn't matter whether TLS 1.3 and successors allows RSA. 
If they have any PFS modes, these will be the only ones public internet servers 
will accept. If they are turned off in enterprise clients, they will not be 
able to connect without going through a gateway which turns them on.

My conclusion is that enterprises that depend on being able to decrypt traffic 
without involving the endpoints should start moving to systems that do involve 
the endpoints.

Cheers - Bill

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz        | Ham radio contesting is a    | Periwinkle
(408)356-8506      | contact sport.               | 16345 
Englewood Ave
www.pwpconsult.com |  - Ken Widelitz K6LA / VY2TT | Los Gatos, CA 95032

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