However, I agree with Tony's assessment:
most of the text is nothing more than a
pompous political statement, much like the sham of
"consensus" that was contrived at the Vancouver IETF.
+1
L.
________________________________________
From: ietf <ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org> on behalf of Roy T. Fielding
<fielding(_at_)gbiv(_dot_)com>
Sent: Friday, 5 June 2015 6:57:24 AM
To: Joe Hildebrand
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: Proposed Statement on "HTTPS everywhere for the IETF"
On Jun 4, 2015, at 9:53 AM, Joe Hildebrand <hildjj(_at_)cursive(_dot_)net>
wrote:
On 4 Jun 2015, at 9:37, Tony Hain wrote:
My overall concern here is that statements like this undermine the integrity
of the organization. I understand people wanting to improve overall privacy,
but this step does not do that in any meaningful way.
Encrypting the channel does provide some small amount of privacy for the
*request*, which is not public information. Browser capabilities, cookies,
etc. benefit from not being easily-correlated with other information.
That is message confidentiality, not privacy. Almost all of the privacy bits
(as in, which
person is doing what and where) are revealed outside of the message.
It would be interesting to define an HTTP header of "Padding" into which the
client would put some random noise to pad the request to a well-known size,
in order to make traffic analysis of the request slightly more difficult.
This is the sort of thing that comes up when we talk about doing more
encryption for the IETF's data, which shows the IESG's suggested approach to
be completely rational.
Browsers don't send singular messages containing anonymous information. They
send a complex
sequence of messages to multiple parties with an interaction pattern and
communication state.
The more complex and encrypted the communication, the more uncommon state and
direct
communication is required, which makes it easier to track a person across
multiple requests
until the user's identity is revealed. Furthermore, with TLS in place, it
becomes easy and
commonplace to send stored authentication credentials in those requests,
without visibility,
and without the ability to easily reset those credentials (unlike in-the-clear
cookies).
Padding has very little effect. It isn't just the message sizes that change --
it is all
of the behavior that changes, and all of the references to that behavior in
subsequent
requests, and the effects of those changes on both the server and the client.
TLS does not provide privacy. What it does is disable anonymous access to
ensure authority.
It changes access patterns away from decentralized caching to more centralized
authority control.
That is the opposite of privacy. TLS is desirable for access to account-based
services wherein
anonymity is not a concern (and usually not even allowed). TLS is NOT
desirable for access to
public information, except in that it provides an ephemeral form of message
integrity that is
a weak replacement for content integrity.
If the IETF wants to improve privacy, it should work on protocols that provide
anonymous
access to signed artifacts (authentication of the content, not the connection)
that is
independent of the user's access mechanism.
I have no objection to the IESG proposal to provide information *also* via
https. It would
be better to provide content signatures and encourage mirroring, just to be a
good example,
but I don't expect eggs to show up before chickens. However, I agree with
Tony's assessment:
most of the text is nothing more than a pompous political statement, much like
the sham of
"consensus" that was contrived at the Vancouver IETF.
TLS everywhere is great for large companies with a financial stake in Internet
centralization.
It is even better for those providing identity services and TLS-outsourcing via
CDNs.
It's a shame that the IETF has been abused in this way to promote a campaign
that will
effectively end anonymous access, under the guise of promoting privacy.
....Roy