The purpose is to provide confidentiality to the vast majority of traffic, even if the authentication part of the CIA triangle isn't achieved. This proposal's purpose is to undo that and expose all traffic using the http:// scheme to your ISP, exactly as it is today. (I would also note that this draft is proposed by AT&T, which is now rolling out new plans in Austin that charge an extra $30/month if you do NOT agree to them inspecting and data-mining all of your internet activity and selling it to advertisers.)
Isn't that a semantic requirement of HTTP, though? Half of the "tech" in the HTTP/1.X spec is to allow for caching of resources and responses by proxies, allowing anyone between the client and server (e.g. your ISP) to act as a CDN.
HTTPS/1.X effectively throws that away by doing end-to-end encryption. It's a trade-off: we gain the surety that all the responses are coming directly from the peer, rather than anyone else... but the web becomes 90% less cacheable, because the only places things can end up cached are between the client and the HTTPS pipe (i.e. the browser cache), or between the HTTPS pipe and the server (i.e. "reverse proxies" like Nginx.)
The current workaround for this, when you need caching for your Big Traffic on either ingress or egress, is to do what amounts to purposeful self-MITMing of your HTTPS session: to terminate HTTPS on a caching proxy, that holds the certificate of your client/server, and acts as if it were you, while itself doing another HTTPS session for "the last mile" to connect to you. This is what companies do when they deploy their own CA-cert to their networks, so everyone's access can be proxied through their own system; and this is what services like Cloudflare do when they sit "in front of" your server while not being a part of your company's VPN at all.
Basically, HTTP2 codifies this workaround, and calls it HTTP.
It's true, HTTPS is full of tradeoffs. You've identified some of them.
What do you see in HTTP/2 that "codifies this workaround"? That wasn't immediately obvious to me. Recall that HTTP/2 is basically just multiplexing with prioritized streams. There's no requirement on TLS in the spec, although all current browser deployments (of SPDY) require TLS.
I fully expect a world where application developers have services at their disposal for positioning assets closer to the end user with VM instance level isolation and security guarantees.
Transport level security is not likely to be enough for high value/sensitivity data in the long run but adding a bunch of new trusted parties to the system is going to be huge enabler for end user surveillance.
I would imagine an ideal HTTP2 caching protocol to basically specify that some resources can come from anywhere, as long as the retrieved result conforms to an attached content hash—while also specifying a primary source to get the resource from, if you don't have a DHT handy. (Oddly enough, this is basically a suggestion that web browsers try to resolve magnet: URNs.)
Is a fair reading of your blog post that it has a high likelihood of succeeding?
Right. I understand that. The lack of certificate verification for the http scheme means that ISPs can MITM HTTP traffic with or without this proposal, just like they can with HTTP/1.1.
So how does this proposal make things worse?
> new plans in Austin that charge an extra $30/month if you do NOT agree to them inspecting and data-mining all of your web browsing and selling it to advertisers
Really? That's a special kind of evil and should be illegal.
Nah, no need to make it illegal. He's referring to AT&T's "GigaPower" gigabit service in Austin... the same service that's available from 2 other providers for the same, or cheaper, as what AT&T's charging for their data-mined bullshit.
AT&T will have a fun time getting customers when Google and Grande point that out in their attack ads. :D
Can they really? At least some of those connections should have the certificates verified out of band, so I'd imagine they would get caught fairly quickly. And then loudly accused of conspiring with the CAs (to stifle competition) or the NSA (to steal your data), or the competitors of whatever site/product was being used, or someone I haven't thought of.
From just a random googling, here's the first news article I found detailing the plan.[1] (See the last three paragraphs.)
[1]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57615246-94/at-t-delivers-g...
UserAgent Proxy Server
TLS Session #1 TLS Session #2
<------------> <------------->
HTTP
<----------------------------------->
So it's about enabling the user to trust -only- the proxy, whereas currently in order to get utility out of a proxy you need to send the traffic as plain HTTP which then trusts both the proxy and the networks over which the data will travel.
That seems to me to absolutely meet the requirements for "strictly better".
If you care about security of your data, end-to-end, then you should probably only use this feature, if at all, with the proxy running on a machine you control - but presumably in that case you currently aren't using plaintext HTTP for anything anyway, so I don't see how it relates.
proxies can inject dog leg routes, single points of failure, computational and i/o bottlenecks and they make lovely centralized dos and data theft targets. They also often downgrade you out of performance enhancements that the client and server would have negotiated if they had been speaking directly (e.g. some actually block compression negotiation so they can observe the content of more flows with less cpu).
Sometimes they do make things faster though - its just not clear to me why we want to continue to centralize that approach rather than distributing it across the network given all the baggage proxying carries.
When the user has given consent to the use of a proxy, the User-Agent SHOULD store this consent so that the user does not have to give consent for each new TLS connection involving the proxy. The consent SHOULD be limited to the specific access and MAY be limited to a single connection to that access or limited in time. How the consent information is stored is implementation specific, but as a network may have several proxies (for network resilience) it is RECOMMENDED that the consent is only tied to the Subject field of the proxy certificate so that the consent applies to all proxy certificates with the same name.
If the user has previously given consent to use the specific proxy and the user-agent has stored that, the user-agent may conclude that the user has given consent without asking the user again.
If the user provides consent, the User-Agent continues the TLS handshake with the proxy.
-----------
Right in the next section, it's again implied:
The proxy will then notice that the TLS connection is to be used for a https resource or for a http resource for which the user wants to opt out from the proxy. The proxy will then forward the ClientHello message to the Server and the TLS connection will be end-to-end between the user-agent and the Server.
-----------
Then in 3.2, again implied:
When the User-Agent arrives to the portal page it becomes aware of the existence of a Proxy in the access network and receives a consent request for the proxy to stay in the path for HTTP URI resources. The user-agent then SHOULD secure user consent.
When the user has given consent to the use of a proxy, both the User-Agent and the Proxy SHOULD store this consent so that the user does not have to give consent for each new TLS connection involving the proxy.