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PHK: HTTP 2.0 Should Be Scrapped
Via the HTTP working group list comes a post from Poul-Henning Kamp proposing that HTTP 2.0 (as it exists now) never be released after the plan of adopting Google's SPDY protocol with minor changes revealed flaws that SPDY/HTTP 2.0 will not address. Quoting: "The WG took the prototype SPDY was, before even completing its
previous assignment, and wasted a lot of time and effort trying to
goldplate over the warts and mistakes in it.
And rather than 'ohh, we get HTTP/2.0 almost for free', we found
out that there are numerous hard problems that SPDY doesn't even
get close to solving, and that we will need to make some simplifications
in the evolved HTTP concept if we ever want to solve them. ...
Wouldn't we get a better result from taking a much deeper look
at the current cryptographic and privacy situation, rather than
publish a protocol with a cryptographic band-aid which doesn't solve
the problems and gets in the way in many applications ? ...
Isn't publishing HTTP/2.0 as a 'place-holder' is just a waste of
everybody's time, and a needless code churn, leading to increased
risk of security exposures and failure for no significant gains ?"
No, you really don't. Encryption is good for Facebook, but enforcing it for your Internet-of-Everything lightbulb or temperature probe in the basement gains nothing other than more complex bugs and lower battery life.
Nice try NSA.
There is also the other thing that there is no urgent need to replace HTTP/1.1, despite of what people claim. Sure, it has problems, but the applications it does not support so well are things that there is not urgent need for, hence there is no urgent need for a protocol replacement. It would be far better to carefully consider what to put into the successor and what not. And KISS should the the overriding concern, anything else causes a lot more problems and wastes a lot more resources than having the successor a few years later.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
HTTP/1.1 is roughly seventeen years old now - technically HTTP/1.0 came out seven years before that, but in terms of mass adoption, NSFNet fizzled in '94 and then people really started to pay attention to the web - I had my first webpage about six months before that (at College) and there were maybe a dozen in the whole school who had heard of it previously. Argue for seven years if you'd like, but I'll say that HTTP/1.0 got seriously revised after three years of significant broad usage. SSLv3, still considered almost usable today, was released the year before. TLSv1.2, considered good, has been a standard for over five years and still it's poorly supported though now critically necessary for some security surfaces.
After this burst of innovation, somebody dreamt up the W3C and we got various levels of baroque standards, all while everybody else solved the same problems over and over again. IETF used to be pretty efficient, but it seems like they're at the same point now.
I won't argue for SPDY becoming HTTP/2.0 but I will admire it as an effort to freaking do something. Some guys at Google said, "look, screw you guys, we're going to try to fix this mess," and they did something. While imperfect, they still did enough that the HTTP/2.0 committee looked at it and said (paraphrasing), "hrm, since we haven't done anything useful for 15 years, let's take SPDY and tweak it and call it a day's work well done."
The part Google got most right was the "screw you guys" part - central-planning the web is not working.. I'm not positive what the right organization structure looks like, but it's not W3C and IETF. We need to figure out what went right back in the mid 90's and do that again, but now with more experience under our belts. This talk of "one protocol to rule them all for 20 years" is undeniably a toxic approach. HTTP/1. 1 should have been deprecated by 2005 and we should be on to the third iteration beyond it by now. Yeah, more core stuff for the devs to do - used to be we had people who could start a company and write a whole new web browser in a year - half the time it takes to change the color of tabs these days.
And don't start with this "but this old browser on ... " crap either - we rapidly iterated before and can do it again. Are there people who fear change? Sure - and nobody is going to stop HTTP/1.1 from working 50 years from now, but by golly nobody should want to use it by then either.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A server cannot ask for encryption.
AFAIK, HTTP2 allows the server to encrypt even if the client didn't want to.
Unless the client establishes a secure connection in the first place, the server has no way of knowing if the client is actually who they claim to be. If the client attempts to establish a secure connection and the server responds with "I can't give you a secure connection" then the client needs to assume there is a man in the middle attack going on and refuse to communicate with the server.
If you're able to modify packets in transit (i.e. Man in the Middle), then you can also just decrypt with your key and re-encrypt with the client key. Without authentication, there's just nothing that's going to prevent a MitM attack. Despite that, being vulnerable to MitM is much better than being vulnerable to any sort of passive listening.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Nothing is NSA-proof, therefore we should just scrap TLS and transmit everything in plaintext, right? The whole point here is not to make the system undefeatable, just to increase the cost of breaking it, just like your door lock isn't perfect, but still useful. If HTTP was always encrypted, even with no authentication, it would require the NSA to man-in-the-middle every single connection if it wants to keep its pervasive monitoring. This would not only make the cost skyrocket, but also make it trivial to detect.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
In order for the security to have any benefit at all, it must be done right, must be free from fundamental flaws and must give the assurances it was designed to give. That is exceedingly hard to do and very unlikely to be done right on the first attempt.
SPDY's security component is TLS. SPDY is essentially just some minor restrictions (not changes) in the TLS negotiation protocol, plus a sophisticated HTTP acceleration protocol tunneled inside. So this really isn't a "first attempt", by any means. Not to mention the fact that Google has been using SPDY extensively for years now and has a great deal of real-world experience with it. Your argument might hold water when applied to QUIC, but not so much to SPDY.
It really helps to read the thread and get a sense of what the actual dispute is about. In a nutshell, Kamp is bothered less that HTTP/2 is complex than that it doesn't achieve enough. In particular, it doesn't address problems that HTTP/1.1 has with being used as a large file (multi-GB) transfer protocol, and it doesn't eliminate cookies. Not many committee members seem to agree that these are important problems for HTTP/2, though most do agree that it would be nice some day to address those issues, in some standard.
What many do agree on is that there is some dangerous complexity in one part of the proposal, a header compression algorithm called HPACK. The reason for using HPACK is the CRIME attack, which exploits Gzip compression of headers to deduce cookies and other sensitive header values. It does this even though the compressed data is encrypted. HPACK is designed to be resistant to this sort of attack, but it's complex. Several committee members are arguing that it would be reasonable to proceed without header compression at all, thus greatly simplifying the proposal. Others are arguing that they can specify HPACK, but make header compression negotiable and allow clients and servers to choose to use nothing rather than HPACK, if they prefer (or something better when it comes along).
Bottom line: What we have here is one committee member who has been annoyed that his wishes to deeply rethink HTTP have been ignored. He is therefore latching onto a real issue that the rest of the committee is grappling with and using it to argue that they should just throw the whole thing out and get to work on what he wanted to do. And he made his arguments with enough flair and eloquence to get attention beyond the committee. All in all, just normal standards committee politics which has (abnormally) escaped the committee mailing list and made it to the front page of /.
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