There are some good examples and arguments there, but to me it reads like it mostly boils down to having SSL, which does quite a good job at solving the chicken

There are some good examples and arguments there, but to me it reads like it mostly boils down to having SSL, which does quite a good job at solving the chicken/egg situation. You can have a good degree of assurance that you talk to the right server, and that your communication to it is not in the clear (of course, what's good degree is debatable, and depends on what you're trying to protect and against whom). I don't quite get why > You could use SSL/TLS to solve this problem, but that's expensive and complicated You can get an SSL trusted certificate for a few bucks, and installing SSL is probably one of the most well-documented sysadmin procedures on the web. How can it be more expensive or more complicated than implementing your own javascript crypto?