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> individual anonymity is more important for the health of internet culture than all the security in the world. TLS provides exactly as much anonymity as HTTP

> individual anonymity is more important for the health of internet culture than all the security in the world. TLS provides exactly as much anonymity as HTTP (ie, none), so it is not trading that away. It only wins security without losing anything. Mr Fielding suggests a hypothetical system that would keep the same amount of privacy as HTTP while ensuring the integrity of the content. But without a proof that it works (or even a full design — how does it prevent a MITM from substituting the signature too?), we can't know that it has any potential. And it certainly doesn't have value now, since it doesn't exist yet. Even if it did exist, the same amount of privacy as HTTP is still the same amount of privacy as TLS. And integrity is not something we can overlook. Imagine that, say, the Chinese government changed a set of RFCs inside its border by MITM them, in such a way as to suggest a different but compatible implementation of cookies that allows them to read them. Then chinese implementors would create insecure tools, and weaken privacy tremendously!

skrebbel 11y ago
> TLS provides exactly as much anonymity as HTTP (ie, none), so it is not trading that away. It only wins security without losing anything. This is simply not true. If I request a resource from a server that is cached by my ISP, my request never reaches the source server and they'll never be able to measure that I requested that resource.
- frankchn 11y ago
  Hypothetically that is true, but do any ISPs do these sort of large-scale caching of resources any more? Also, if the site wants to track you that way, couldn't they (or anyone in the middle of your connection) just send no-cache headers with everything and a well behaved transparent cache will retrieve from origin every time anyway? In any case, personally I am inclined to trust the operators of the websites I visit more than Comcast, my ISP. I do not want my ISP to do anything to my traffic except to forward it on to the intended recipient.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  So you want your ISP to MITM-attack your requests? (transparent proxy of your outgoing plaintext HTTP) Outside of unusual local/niche applications, are ISPs even doing this? (with Verizon doing their MITM to add their deplorable X-UIDH head, I suppose this is possible) It would probably be a huge copyright violation for any ISP to cache without some sort of negotiated agreement with the website. If such negotiations did happen, that just moves the anonymity problem from the website to the ISP, ascting as the website's agent. Local ISP caching in traditional Akamai-style was a DNS trick where your browser makes an explicit reqest to the local cache. You would still make the same requests into the cache no matter the transport.
- Flimm 11y ago
  In that case, you just unexpectedly told a third party about your request, whereas with HTTPS, you only tell the intended party about your request. How does it improve your anonymity to unexpectedly have third parties intercept your request, read it and respond to it? If you want to choose to use a third party mirror, then you can do so: just explicitly request the mirror, over HTTPS to avoid a MITM attack.
  - Anderkent 11y ago
    That's message confidentiality, not privacy. The win to privacy is that instead of telling the intended party and every third party in the middle about you accessing some resource, you only tell the subset of third parties between you and the cache. Since it's more difficult to intercept access to all possible caches than to a centralised server, that's a win for privacy. At a cost of message confidentiality, of course, but if your message content doesn't need to be confidential (i.e. you're just GETing a resource), it's not a big loss.
    - espadrine 11y ago
      > you only tell the subset of third parties between you and the cache. That's not a privacy win at all if you want privacy from the cache, if you don't trust the cache, if the cache is wholly owned or used by you alone. Even if all of that doesn't apply, you don't even have a guarantee that it will hit the cache. If it is a cache miss, no “privacy win”. How many asterisks does this claim of a privacy win need before it should no longer be considered valid? > At a cost of message confidentiality, of course, but if your message content doesn't need to be confidential (i.e. you're just GETing a resource), it's not a big loss. You are forgetting the loss of message integrity, as well. That is a big loss.
Buge 11y ago
I think a more realistic example of a MITM by China is their recent injecting botnet code to DDOS github. Also ISPs and wifi hotspots inject ads fairly often.

skrebbel 11y ago

> TLS provides exactly as much anonymity as HTTP (ie, none), so it is not trading that away. It only wins security without losing anything. This is simply not true. If I request a resource from a server that is cached by my ISP, my request never reaches the source server and they'll never be able to measure that I requested that resource.

frankchn 11y ago
Hypothetically that is true, but do any ISPs do these sort of large-scale caching of resources any more? Also, if the site wants to track you that way, couldn't they (or anyone in the middle of your connection) just send no-cache headers with everything and a well behaved transparent cache will retrieve from origin every time anyway? In any case, personally I am inclined to trust the operators of the websites I visit more than Comcast, my ISP. I do not want my ISP to do anything to my traffic except to forward it on to the intended recipient.
pdkl95 11y ago
So you want your ISP to MITM-attack your requests? (transparent proxy of your outgoing plaintext HTTP) Outside of unusual local/niche applications, are ISPs even doing this? (with Verizon doing their MITM to add their deplorable X-UIDH head, I suppose this is possible) It would probably be a huge copyright violation for any ISP to cache without some sort of negotiated agreement with the website. If such negotiations did happen, that just moves the anonymity problem from the website to the ISP, ascting as the website's agent. Local ISP caching in traditional Akamai-style was a DNS trick where your browser makes an explicit reqest to the local cache. You would still make the same requests into the cache no matter the transport.
Flimm 11y ago
In that case, you just unexpectedly told a third party about your request, whereas with HTTPS, you only tell the intended party about your request. How does it improve your anonymity to unexpectedly have third parties intercept your request, read it and respond to it? If you want to choose to use a third party mirror, then you can do so: just explicitly request the mirror, over HTTPS to avoid a MITM attack.
- Anderkent 11y ago
  That's message confidentiality, not privacy. The win to privacy is that instead of telling the intended party and every third party in the middle about you accessing some resource, you only tell the subset of third parties between you and the cache. Since it's more difficult to intercept access to all possible caches than to a centralised server, that's a win for privacy. At a cost of message confidentiality, of course, but if your message content doesn't need to be confidential (i.e. you're just GETing a resource), it's not a big loss.
  - espadrine 11y ago
    > you only tell the subset of third parties between you and the cache. That's not a privacy win at all if you want privacy from the cache, if you don't trust the cache, if the cache is wholly owned or used by you alone. Even if all of that doesn't apply, you don't even have a guarantee that it will hit the cache. If it is a cache miss, no “privacy win”. How many asterisks does this claim of a privacy win need before it should no longer be considered valid? > At a cost of message confidentiality, of course, but if your message content doesn't need to be confidential (i.e. you're just GETing a resource), it's not a big loss. You are forgetting the loss of message integrity, as well. That is a big loss.

Buge 11y ago

I think a more realistic example of a MITM by China is their recent injecting botnet code to DDOS github. Also ISPs and wifi hotspots inject ads fairly often.