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Mandatory encryption as part of HTTP2

Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com> Thu, 14 November 2013 20:42 UTC

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From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>
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Subject: Mandatory encryption as part of HTTP2
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 21:42:41 +0100
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Forgive me if this has been discussed before, but I haven't been active on this list for a while and I didn't see subject lines that indicated recent discussions on this.

Apparently the chair of the httpbis wg is proposing to make encryption a mandatory part HTTP version 2:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2013OctDec/0625.html

I have many medium-sized problems with this, including the issues with CAs, the additional fragility of depending on certs with limited lifetimes, performance and energy efficiency issues (both the batteries in mobile hosts and the power use in datacenters), severely reduced cacheability and debugging which are reasonable tradeoffs when privacy and authentication are needed, but are wasteful when they're not, which is still very often the case.

But a more fundamental problem with this approach is that it ties HTTP2 to TLS, while TLS is not a very good technology, except that it has proven easy to deploy. When we finally figure out how to get IPsec deployed as a general purpose solution for privacy and authentication, it would be quite annoying to have to run TLS, too, because HTTP2 requires it.

I'm not entirely sure why the existing problematic solution with certs and CAs was proposed here, as the intended goal, keep the NSA and friends out of our business, would be hard to reach that way. Using some kind of opportunistic encryption would serve that purpose much better, IMO.

(However, I do think there is value in making it possible to enable encryption when needed/desired without requiring the use of the https URL scheme.)

Deliberating exactly these kinds of issues is why the IAB gets paid the big bucks. So I hope the IAB can take on this issue.

Iljitsch

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