Carsten Bormann wrote on 08/06/2020 10:54:
Security protocols used right would have protected us from this and
would have made the bit errors a performance statistic…)
not at the time, no. There was no cpu support for common crypto
operations then, so enabling transport layer security would have trashed
performance to the point that the server would have been unusable. Even
years later, you couldn't feasibly enable SSL on servers without
offloading to hardware assistance cards.
We've really forgotten how computationally expensive cryptography is,
now that it's been swept under the carpet by increasingly advanced
hardware support. E.g. even consumer grade CPUs have had dedicated
native AES encryption support for the last 10 years.
But now that it's here, it's compelling to use pervasively.
Nick
