On 11/1/2024 3:14 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
--On Friday, November 1, 2024 13:36 -0700 Rob Sayre
<sayrer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,
I think the reason to encrypt everything is more innocuous.
You get message integrity that way. This just helps prevent buggy
programs, as they will break right away.
Rob,
I'm sure our colleagues who spend their professional lives on
security issues can explain this better than I can and will correct
me if I get this wrong. With the understanding that I may not have
the terminology quite right either, I think the answer is "no".
Actually, message integrity is a very nice side-benefit of doing
encryption. Before deployment of encryption, it was not uncommon to have
middle boxes twiddle bits in the application messages, for various
reasons -- for example, rewriting the required video encoding from
high-def to low-def, but that's just an example. This kind of
modifications would often trigger user complaints, or be incompatible
with the next version of the application protocol and cause crashes.
They were very hard to debug from the server side, because the server
could only guess what bits the client received. What Rob mentions is by
no mean the only reason -- Barry is right that "making sure that
encryption users do not stand out" is the primary reason. But it is
definitely an additional motivation.
-- Christian Huitema
