Greetings, thinking on how to practically challenge the massive wiretapper (interceping on telecommunication lines/fibers/internet exchanges), there is a general acceptance that "opportunistic encryption" systems could be a good approach. To protect against massive wiretapping of SMTP email that's the approach already discussed here: https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-August/011130.htm... To protect against massive wiretapping of HTTP traffic, the general understanding is to use HTTPS. However HTTPS have several serious drawbacks: - The owner of a website have to pay "more" for the security of it's web-clients (buy a digital certificate) - The owner of a website have to pay "more" for the hosting of an HTTPS site vs. HTTP site - If the owner of a web don't pay more the end-user browser receive a BIG SECURITY WARNING (self-signed certificate) For the reason previously identified the "HTTPS" approach is still very valuable but it does not scale up to protect against massive wiretapper intercepting HTTP. The idea to fix this problem by creating a technology that enable opportunistic encryption of all data exchanged (via AJAX) by modern javascript applications by leveraging unathenticated TLS with DHE ciphers (providing Perfect Forward Secrecy). This could be realized by providing a "thin" layer of integration into any existing Javascript application to wrap the XHR/Ajax requests, proxying them trough a Javascript TLS Client, with some server-side code acting as a gateway/minimal TLS implementation working within an HTTP in HTTP tunnelling model. If a techology like that would exists, it would be possible to integrate it as part of Wordpress or Django or other commonly used web framework/technology. This would provide by default unauthenticated TLS encryption for most of it's web traffic, with perfect forward secrecy, without HTTPS. I tried to summarize the idea on the Forge (Javascript TLS stack) github issue at https://github.com/digitalbazaar/forge/issues/84 . I know that this kind of argument attract crypto-trolling ("Javascript encryption" and "Unauthenticated encryption" and "Opportunistic encryption") but i think that it's worth discussing because it could be a revolutionary approach to challenge massive wiretapping. What does various people think about this approach? -- Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) HERMES - Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights http://logioshermes.org - http://globaleaks.org - http://tor2web.org -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys@stanford.edu.