The supposed "chilling effects" don't work out in practice. You will sometimes see people saying oh, China blocks TLS 1.3. Nope, many of the services you use now have TLS 1.3 and yet still work fine in China. "They just push people to a fallback". Nope, Downgrade Protection means that's exactly the same as just dropping all TLS connections.
TLS 1.3 doesn't change the correct way to interpose, it just makes yet more of the bad ideas that shouldn't work actually not work. If you were doing any of those and they broke, that's not TLS 1.3, that's because you were doing something that we already warned you shouldn't work. Stop doing things that can't work.
And it's true, such people keep demanding "transparency". I think they'd probably avoid some of their problems by just admitting that what they want is at best eavesdropping and that this isn't what other people think "transparency" means. There was a whole thread about this on the TLS working group list earlier in May. We get it, you would like to eavesdrop on people, but you don't like to admit this and you'd prefer if there was some way to pretend everything is fine, while, on the other hand, actually eavesdropping.
What's funniest is that the big players in this game want to play both sides so badly they can't even stop contradicting themselves long enough to write a document. The last version of draft-camwinget-opsec-ns-impact that I reviewed has such an obvious contradiction which I called out, it wants everybody else to use RSA key exchange, so that it can snoop all their TLS traffic, but of course implementers of the draft must forbid RSA key exchange, so that nobody snoops them.
If the network was actually dumb perhaps we wouldn't have as many issues with routers fiddling with TCP as the GP described.
If was really, really dumb perhaps we could have managed to deploy SCTP and DCCP.
I wonder how much NAT interferes with new protocols, and if 'simple' stateful inspection with IPv6 would (have) made thing easier.
Generalized "optimizer" middleboxes don't actually work in real world performance testing, with the possible exception of machines that apply dumb global queue discipline to fix a defective buffering device somewhere else in the network, but these don't need to do packet inspection at all, just byte-counting/early-drop.
Traffic shaping mostly only works in the endpoint, but aside from that, all you need is src/dest/byte count to do as good as traffic shaping as it is possible to do without being circumvented trivially (by the far end, without the users knowledge, thanks to the web letting the server script the client)
If you want to run a totalitarian state, do what actually competent totalitarian states do and take over the endpoints.
Dismissing the security features they are ostensibly delivering snakeoil is more than a bit unfair. There is a legit security context where absolute transparency & auditability is the right design objective, rather than absolute privacy. I'd argue the greatest failing we've seen with the evolution of TLS was the failure to recognize and address that reality.
This is true for QUIC too. Obey the invariants. You don't need to read all these complicated documents, just the invariants.
Now of course there are obstacles. First doing this is expensive. Doing things that don't obey the invariants (many of which also destroy your security) was cheaper. Too bad. If your supposed "legit security context" is so valuable you'll afford this.
Second doing this in effect requires confessing to the people you were "legitimately" giving "transparency & auditability" that you are snooping on them. Too bad, if your supposed "legit security context" really was what you pretend this conversation will be easy for you.
The problem isn't the cost or the "confession", because those are already part of the context. The problem is that in the process it creates new security risks that needn't be there but for the choices made by TLS.
In particular, the lack of separation of concerns between protections from eavesdropping, tampering and forgery proves to be quite problematic for environments where forgery & tampering are a serious concern, but eavesdropping is the nature of the context. It's why you see proposals for ugly hacks of TLS like eTLS; it's doing more harm than good.
But it's essential in practice to remember that overwhelmingly the environment people are interested in is the Web, and on the Web those aren't actually different things again, in practice.
For example, suppose you're OK with me eavesdropping your Amazon purchases. You're buying a Lego robot for your daughter's birthday, you work for the investment bank, it's nice that we even let you do that from work and clearly we can't just let you do whatever you want with no oversight or you might rob us blind. We have a hypothetical TLS 1.4 which lets you opt in to this eavesdropping but nothing else, and you've done exactly this.
We eavesdrop your purchase, we were prevented from tampering with it. But, this is the Web. The eavesdropped TLS session contains a secret cookie value, which identifies you to Amazon. We can use this to impersonate you and do whatever we want, just as if we were able to tamper with your TLS session. The apparently more limited permissions are a mirage.
If the problem is the web, then the problem should be addressed by the web, not TLS.
...and of course, part of the problem is that we've conflated nearly everything to the "web", so thinking that the web is somehow removed from this problem is a mistake.
> We eavesdrop your purchase, we were prevented from tampering with it. But, this is the Web. The eavesdropped TLS session contains a secret cookie value, which identifies you to Amazon. We can use this to impersonate you and do whatever we want, just as if we were able to tamper with your TLS session. The apparently more limited permissions are a mirage.
Yup, that's a legit problem, though I'd argue it actually further reinforces my point. This is a good example of a problem that stems from conflating multiple security concerns, rather than addressing them as separate concerns.
If there's an acknowledgement that your authenticated & tamper proof session is fully exposed to eaves dropping, then you start using the authentication mechanism itself to identify people or you develop an additional identification mechanism that is resilient to replay attacks (both of which are entirely possible) or people just inherently become aware of the reality that buying stuff on Amazon from an eavesdropping environment means that they will be impersonated on Amazon. What you don't do is think a "secret cookie value" is a secret when it so clearly is not.
Transparency and Auditability are real, but they absolutely require endpoint security.
If you don't control the endpoint you don't know if it has an LTE chip, and if you do control the endpoint you don't care.
DPI security middleboxes for the enterprise are always and without exception snakeoil and/or checkboxware.
If you don't care that your broker may be selling you down the river, or whether information is being leaked to an intelligence operative, that's a fair assessment. Unfortunately, much as we might wish otherwise, there can be conflict between privacy solutions and security solutions. The trick is to find a way to service both without compromising either.
Not all traffic is web traffic, maybe not even most of it. There are so many things that would have absolutely wretched performance if you tried to implement them with HTTP instead of TCP. HTTP is way too generic to be truly performant.
That said, the TLS v1.3 thing has been interesting. I tend to look at it more as a case of projecting one security context onto everyone else's security context, and the consequent problems involved. Security is tough like that.
This assumes that lack of transparency is the only way forward. I'd argue that IP and TCP ossified not because of transparency, but because the design didn't make it easy enough to simultaneously remain compatible while adding new functionality. Yet we know a transparent, grokable, mungeable, backwards-and-forwards-compatible protocol that plays well with middle boxes is doable: HTTP. We could design lower-level protocols to have the same design properties, with both long-lived backwards compatibility and the ability to adopt new functionality. If the problem is with middleboxes, then the solution shouldn't be "how can we avoid them", but "how can we make a protocol that works well with them".
(As a side note, a lack of transparency has chilling effects. Since the adoption of TLS v1.3, more and more TLS security has been broken in order to provide the necessary IT functions of traffic inspection, caching, routing, classifying, shaping, and blocking. Nation states will need to continue creating their own fragmented walled gardens, and continue invading privacy more, precisely because we're giving them less control over how they manage these functions which are a matter of national policy. You can't software you way out of a process problem.)