IAB Statement on Internet Confidentiality Encryption should be authenticated where possible, but even protocols providing confidentiality without authentication are useful in the face of pervasive surveillance as described in RFC 7258. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7258
Alex: On a more serious note, the IAB statement below opens up a whole can of worms. You can't [...]
[... cants, buts, excuses, grandmas, future protocols and policy, stake making and preserving, wimps, legal, etc... on and on... ad nauseum]
Ian / Jay: Wot? I encrypt all the time without dealing with legal issues. ... No more free lunches, no more rolling over and playing doggy. ... No, we need not negotiate with ourselves before building and deploying stuff. https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/
Indeed. Many seem to be missing the hidden extension / meaning of whitewashed quasi-political statements like those of the IAB that are now coming from various entities, and it's a point that needs made directly, at least regarding one aspect of things... It's not anymore about 'should encrypt by default'... continuing to give yourselves the lazy fallback excuse of oppurtunistic crypto and waiting for someone else to do it. It's not anymore about asking your masters for permission to do what is not regulated today, or giving them seats and chance to muddle / dictate your protocols before they're developed / deployed. It's about 'must encrypt' and turning plaintext completely off NOW! It's about telling all the lazy oppurtunistic fiber tapping passive surveillors, (who are today breaking fundamental inalienable human rights not just regulations, and without asking first)... to FUCK OFF! This is not a time to play nice and compromise... it's war, one which they started against you. So deploy your crypto now, far and wide, and faster than the enemy can respond. Mass internet entrenchment has a winning history against subsequent fiat. We won the first crypto war, now it's time to win the second one. Flip the crypto switch, from off to on. Don't ask, don't tell, just do it. Mail providers and web services... turn plaintext off! Banks, schools, utilities, blogs, socialnets, OS distributions, user applications... the public facing, used by the public, whole lot of you... everyone, everywhere... just turn plaintext off! All plaintext transports over the internet... OFF! Even decentralized P2P applications such as chat / filesharing apps that wish no model using CA certs, can still enforce crypto by skipping cert checking under self-signed certs or using [EC]DHE style crypto session negotiation. There's no lack of capability or support among all these internet facing services and apps used by the general public anymore. Every OS / library can deal with TLS 1.0+ or key negotiation for that. And you don't need some grand crypto scheme that you all love to pontificate in endless circles about right now either. Just turn the damn plaintext OFF and tell everyone to go read the FAQ and update their end if they can't connect. Then worry about your pie in the sky later. It doesn't have to be perfect, all you need to do is shift the game from taking cheap passive global wire surveillance up the ass, to requiring more expensive targeted active attacks. Simply turning off the plaintext does that, it's a huge win! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#Applications_and_adop... And while you're at it, set up a nonprofit CA foundation to issue free certs and get it added to the Mozilla and MS cert stores specifically for the purpose of accomplishing 'plaintext off'. CA's are useless profiteers who couldn't authenticate their own ass as customers anyways, and cert stores are uselessly bloated with both them and enemy entities... so just give the damn certs away to anyone who can publish a proof of ownership flag / TLS cert on the forward reference to their own services... simply to quiet self-signed warnings. Nice to see something like this just dropped as I write: https://letsencrypt.org/ Pick July 4 2015 as the day to disable plaintext, since by then everything worth anything will support TLS 1.2 / good negotiation parameters, and it's a fitting meme. And if you don't like that flag, hoist another one... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Talk_Like_a_Pirate_Day Now quit reading, making excuses and waiting... the enemy will just stomp all over your flag. Go get started on your code, updates and crypto configs... you've got a flag day to make.