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Pseudo HTTPS Proposed

posted by Dopefish on Monday February 24 2014, @06:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the things-could-get-hairy dept.

mrbluze writes:

"A modified HTTP protocol is being proposed (the proposal is funded by AT&T) which would allow ISP's to decrypt and re-encrypt traffic as part of day to day functioning in order to save money on bandwidth through caching. The draft document states:

To distinguish between an HTTP2 connection meant to transport "https" URIs resources and an HTTP2 connection meant to transport "http" URIs resource, the draft proposes to 'register a new value in the Application Layer Protocol negotiation (ALPN) Protocol IDs registry specific to signal the usage of HTTP2 to transport "http" URIs resources: h2clr.

The proposal is being criticized by Lauren Weinstein in that it provides a false sense of security to end users who might believe that their communications are actually secure. Can this provide an ISP with an excuse to block or throttle HTTPS traffic?"

 
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  • (Score: 1) by SMI on Tuesday February 25 2014, @06:24PM

    by SMI (333) on Tuesday February 25 2014, @06:24PM (#6801)

    Precisely. One of the first things that came to my mind when reading TFS is how much more difficult it's going to be to try to explain encryption to people, now that we'll have to explain that some encryption is real and works, while others (like this) are deliberately designed only to give a sense of false security to people who kind of care about their privacy, so they're interested, but without the technical background and understanding to see this for what it really is.