Mercury

[solderpunk]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 06:30:26PM +0200, Felix Queißner wrote:
> Hey
> 
> > That the point about serving public data encrypted while every body can request it?
> > Example:
> > - public domain book
> > - weather (curl wttr.in/paris)
> > - public news
> > - governmental information
> > - cute kitten videos
> > - etc.
> Yes, as you can trust that you actually receive the data the server
> wants you to see. If a MITM attack happens, they can serve you the wrong
> news for example, wrong governmental information (deluding you to do
> illegal acts)

Okay, I lied, some Mercury responses today, not tomorrow. :)

No MITM attack is even necessary for this näive "I can use plaintext
to read publically available information and only turn it on when I do
important secret stuff" attitude to backfire!  Does this really need
explanation in 2020?  Here's a list of publically available,
non-personal information, a lot of which you could find in a good
public library, which would nevertheless be a very bad idea to be
easily identified as wanting to read or having read in various
times/places in recent history right up to the present, with
consequences ranging from serious social stigma and ostracism to
imprisonment, torture and death:

* The Bible
* The Torah
* The Quran
* The collected works of Karl Marx
* The collected works of the US founding fathers
* Eye-witness accounts of what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989
* Factual medical information concerning contraception
* Factual medical information concerning abortion
* Factual medical information concerning sexually transmitted diseases
* Factual medical information concerning same-sex sexual health
* Factual legal information concerning domestic violence
* Factual legal information concerning sexual assault
* Factual legal information concerning recreational drugs
* Factual political information on when/where/how to vote for X
* Public news reporting from the "wrong" source

This is not a remote issue affecting only distant third-world
dictatorships, or an outdated issue only relevant in the McCarthyist
past; plenty of the above will get you into trouble in certain parts of
Western liberal democracies in 2020 - okay, probably not tortured or
killed by the government, but people will absolutely be bullied, be
beaten up, be kicked out of home, be kicked out of school, or lose
friends, parters or jobs because of some of the above material even in
"normal" countries where none of the above is illegal (and in the case
of information on abortion in some parts of the US, jail time is not 
actually inconceivable).

Often times the adversary who needs to be defeated to avoid these
scenarios is not an all-powerful intelligence/police/military actor with
a big budget and a team of infosec specialists and a warehouse full of
supercomputers, for whom TLS is (perhaps) not impenetrable, but rather
parents, teachers, classmates, employers, nosy small business owners
providing open wireless hotspots, script kiddies sniffing traffic on
said hotspots or small, rural police departments for whom we can safely
assume TLS *is* impenetrable.

Lucky you if 99% of what you want to read online does not fall into
these categories at the present time in your present location, but:
* What's safe today may not be safe tomorrow (and computers can
  remember for a long time).
* Making it easy to deliberately perform unencrypted transactions when
  it's safe simultaneously makes it easy to accidentally perform (or to
  be tricked into performing) unencrypted transactions when it's *not*
  safe.
* Only using encryption the 1% of times you really need it makes the
  use of encryption suspicious in and of itself.

Crypto is not a "sometimes food"!  More or less the entire technology
industry has accepted this argument and the simultaneous side-by-side
existence of http:// and https:// with browsers equally happy to accept
either is on its way to becoming a brief historical accident.  I'm
really unenthusiastic about deliberately rolling that clock back in
Geminispace.  More than one person has told me that Gopher's lack of
support for encryption stopped them from ditching the web in favour of
Gopher, despite prefering Gopher in every other respect.  Now they're
happily in Geminispace.  I suspect that this is *not* an unusual
situation.

Yes, it sucks that this philosophy drags in some complexity (I chose TLS
precisely to try to minimise the *implementation* complexity, by virtue
of ubiquitious library support and documentation) and some performance
penalty (which we so far have not made much serious effort to
ameliorate) and an increased energy footprint (which I assure you
professional cryptographers are actively trying to reduce without
compromising security, because doing so will improve battery life on
phones and "smart" devices, which is a multi-billion dollar industry,
and by virtue of using the industry-standard TLS we'll be able to reap
future payoffs of this research - and which, anyway, I am not sure is
actually greater than the wireless data transmission footprint in many
real-world scenarios).  I still think it's the right philosophy for
Gemini and that throwing away important privacy protections for the sake
of decreased latency would make many more would-be Geminauts sad than
it would make happy.  I really think we just need to do our best to
minimise the impact of the unavoidable suckage that ubiquitious
cryptography brings with it.

Cheers,
Solderpunk