Re: [hrpc] hrpc session at IETF98

["Giovane C. M. Moura" <[e-mail]>]

Hi Niels,


> Do people have other points for the agenda they would like to suggest?
> Or speaker for the current or next session? New drafts? Discussion topics?

We have a report that may be in the interest of the WG.
We show how the hosting industry has reacted to efforts of the
community/industry to make encryption easier.

We show that once costs and complexity are removed, big players are
prone to deploy, in bulk, encryption across large number of sites,
enabling encryption in sites and domains that would otherwise be left
behind. The lessons learned can be also be generalized to other
security-related issues.

(I have also submitted this to MAPRG,but the agenda is still being defined).

Title: No domain left behind: is Let's Encrypt democratizing encryption?

Full paper at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.03005 PDF:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.03005v1

Summary: The 2013 National Security Agency revelations of pervasive
monitoring have lead to an "encryption rush" across the computer and
Internet industry. To push back against massive surveillance and protect
users privacy, vendors, hosting and cloud providers have widely deployed
encryption on their hardware, communication links, and applications. As
a consequence, the most of web traffic nowadays is encrypted. However,
there is still a significant part of Internet traffic that is not
encrypted. It has been argued that both costs and complexity associated
with obtaining and deploying X.509 certificates are major barriers for
widespread encryption, since these certificates are required to
established encrypted connections. To address these issues, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and the University
of Michigan have set up Let's Encrypt (LE), a certificate authority that
provides both free X.509 certificates and software that automates the
deployment of these certificates. In this paper, we investigate if LE
has been successful in democratizing encryption: we analyze certificate
issuance in the first year of LE and show from various perspectives that
LE adoption has an upward trend and it is in fact being successful in
covering the lower-cost end of the hosting market.

/giovane