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Most Alarming: IETF Draft Proposes "Trusted Proxy" In HTTP/2.0

Lauren Weinstein writes "You'd think that with so many concerns these days about whether the likes of AT&T, Verizon, and other telecom companies can be trusted not to turn our data over to third parties whom we haven't authorized, that a plan to formalize a mechanism for ISP and other 'man-in-the-middle' snooping would be laughed off the Net. But apparently the authors of IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) Internet-Draft 'Explicit Trusted Proxy in HTTP/2.0' (14 Feb 2014) haven't gotten the message. What they propose for the new HTTP/2.0 protocol is nothing short of officially sanctioned snooping."

3 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Re:if you want a trusted proxy.. by the_B0fh · · Score: 5, Informative

    You don't understand how things work, do you? This bypasses your "acceptance" requirement.

    They can just do it transparently.

  2. Re:if you want a trusted proxy.. by haruchai · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Lauren Weinstein is no lightweight; there's a good reason he's a Google consultant and have 400,000 followers. It's not for his singing & dancing.

    --
    Pain is merely failure leaving the body
  3. I don't see what the fuss is about. by SuricouRaven · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's already quite easy to add a * certificate to a browser to allow a proxy to intercept SSL. This is a standard practice in many LANs to allow the web filter to work on SSL pages - otherwise it'd be impossible to perform more than the most basic DNS/IP filtering on HTTPS sites, which would let a *lot* of undesired content through - google images alone would be quite the pornucopia.

    All this proposal does is formalise the mechanism that people are already widely using. The end user still needs to explicitly authorise the proxy, no different than adding a * certificate today - and that's something so common, Windows lets you do it via group policy. The author's big fear seems to be that ISPs could start blocking everything unless the user authorises their proxy - and they could do that already, just be blocking everything unless the user authorises their * certificate!

    And either way, they won't. For reasons of simple practicality. Sure, they could make the proxy authroisation process easy by giving a little 'config for dummies' executable. Easily done. Now repeat the same for the user's family with their three mobile phones (One android, one iOS, one blackberry), two games consoles, IP-connected streaming TV, the kid's PSP and DS (Or successor products), the tablet and the internet-connected burgler alarm. All of which will be using HTTP of some form to communicate with servers somewhere, and half of them over HTTPS, with the proportion shooting *way* up if HTTP/2.0 catches on.