> Even if an attacker got hold of this private host key, they'd have to be able to MitM the connections This is not hard. If it were hard, we wouldn't need enc

> Even if an attacker got hold of this private host key, they'd have to be able to MitM the connections This is not hard. If it were hard, we wouldn't need encrypted connections. If I were a nation state, it would be trivial to position an attack at the edge of a network peering point for a given service. How do I know? Our own government did it for 10+ years. Cyber criminals often have the same tactics and skills and can find significant monetary reasons to assume heightened risk in order to pull off a compromise. Random black hats enjoy the challenge of compromising high value targets and can find numerous ways to creatively infiltrate networks to perform additional attacks. Even without gaining access to a network, virtually anyone on the internet can simply push a bad BGP config and capture traffic for an arbitrary target. Weird routing routinely happens that nobody can definitely say isn't such an attack.