3 ms·

Doesn't it also make sense in the context of modern networking assumptions? I've never had to connect to PostGres in an adversarial environment. I've been at w

by dmurray 7mo ago

Doesn't it also make sense in the context of modern networking assumptions? I've never had to connect to PostGres in an adversarial environment. I've been at work or at home and I connected to PostGres instances owned by me or my employer. If I tried to connect to my work instance from a coffee shop, the first thing I'd do would be to log in to a VPN. That's your multiplexed protocol layer right there: the security happens at the network layer and your cancel happens at the application layer. This is a different situation from websites. I connect to websites owned by third parties all the time, and I want my communication there to be encrypted at the application layer.

gruez 7mo ago
>I've never had to connect to PostGres in an adversarial environment. heroku's postgres database service still exposes itself on the public internet.
xmcqdpt2 7mo ago
Zero trust security which is becoming increasingly common is based on removing the internal / external network dichotomy entirely. Everything should be assumed to be reachable from the open internet (so SSO, OIDC everywhere.)
somat 7mo ago
It makes me think of ipsec, ipsec was originally intended to be used sort of the the same as we use tls today, but application independent. when making a connection to a random remote machine the os would see if it could spool up a ipsec sa. No changes to a user program would be needed. But while they were faffing about trying to overcomplicate ipsec ssl came along and stole it's lunch money. This application of ipsec was never used and barely implemented. Today getting it to make ad-hoc connections is a tricky untested edge case and ipsec was regulated to dedicated tunnels. Where everyone hates it because it is too tricky to get the parameters aligned. There is definitely a case to be made that it is right and proper that secure connections are handled in the application(tls), But sometimes I like to think of how it could have been. where all applications get a secure connection whether they want one or not. As a useless dangling side thought, an additional piece would be needed for ad-hoc ipsec that as far as I know was never implemented, a way to notify the OS that this connection must be encrypted(a socket option? SO_ENC?). This is most of the case for encrypted connections being the duty of the application.

by dmurray 7mo ago

gruez 7mo ago

>I've never had to connect to PostGres in an adversarial environment. heroku's postgres database service still exposes itself on the public internet.

xmcqdpt2 7mo ago

Zero trust security which is becoming increasingly common is based on removing the internal / external network dichotomy entirely. Everything should be assumed to be reachable from the open internet (so SSO, OIDC everywhere.)

somat 7mo ago

It makes me think of ipsec, ipsec was originally intended to be used sort of the the same as we use tls today, but application independent. when making a connection to a random remote machine the os would see if it could spool up a ipsec sa. No changes to a user program would be needed. But while they were faffing about trying to overcomplicate ipsec ssl came along and stole it's lunch money. This application of ipsec was never used and barely implemented. Today getting it to make ad-hoc connections is a tricky untested edge case and ipsec was regulated to dedicated tunnels. Where everyone hates it because it is too tricky to get the parameters aligned. There is definitely a case to be made that it is right and proper that secure connections are handled in the application(tls), But sometimes I like to think of how it could have been. where all applications get a secure connection whether they want one or not. As a useless dangling side thought, an additional piece would be needed for ad-hoc ipsec that as far as I know was never implemented, a way to notify the OS that this connection must be encrypted(a socket option? SO_ENC?). This is most of the case for encrypted connections being the duty of the application.