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Re: Hum theatre

2013-11-07 12:30:49
Jari,

Well spoken

Klaas


On Nov 7, 2013, at 7:09 PM, Jari Arkko <jari(_dot_)arkko(_at_)piuha(_dot_)net> 
wrote:

I wanted to provide my thoughts on this. 

First, in the interest of full disclosure, Russ and I conferred on stage 
about the questions, and he had my OK to go ahead. 

Now, of course the questions were at a high level, and with full hindsight 
they could have been more neutrally formulated. At the end of the day, they 
are what they are. And should be given the value they deserve.

I'd actually like to argue that the IETF position on this topic is something 
bigger, something where the plenary discussion and hums played a supporting 
role but they are not the sole determination. Here's my take-away from this 
week:

"The IETF considers pervasive-monitoring as a security issue and is willing 
to work to address it."

Nothing more, nothing less. Most working groups that I went to were 
addressing this topic in one way or the other, going through application by 
application, doing careful work to understand what options we have to improve 
security, and weighing the various trade-offs in different designs. The proof 
of the pudding is in the eating. "We need to address it" vs. "We are putting 
in the cycles to address it". When I look at the discussions throughout the 
week, it is very clear to me that we are putting in the cycles. 

As Carsten said:

As always, hard work follows, and the devil is in the details.  But that 
doesn’t take away from the unanimity.

And indeed there are a lot of details and trade-offs to worry about. 
Opportunistic encryption, for instance, has been discussed at length this 
week and the variants and trade-offs are far from clear.

I think the next steps are what is important. And this is a long term effort. 
Here are some of the things we should be doing:

- work on the general guidance in this area ("consider it as an attack", 
"recommended ways to apply opportunistic encryption", "threat model changes", 
...)

- work on the specific protocols and application areas (http, xmpp, etc)

Jari



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