Re: [saag] Is opportunistic unauthenticated encryption a waste of time?

[Theodore Ts'o <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 07:13:54PM -0700, Bernard Aboba wrote:
> The first assertion, is likely to
> be proven false by the first gear to include built-in
> man-in-the-middle attack support.  Care to wager which appears
> first, carrier-class gear supporting man-in-the-middle attacks, or
> significant deployment of "opportunistic" encryption?

This assumes that the telecom carriers and/or the suppliers of the
carrier grade equipment would cooperate with the nation-states in
question.  That could happen, certainly, but it becomes much more
difficult to do this surreptitiously.

This won't help in a totalitarian regime, certainly, but in democratic
societies having law enforcement agencies engaging in mass,
surreptitious surveilance might be less likely to be tolerated.

Cheers,

							- Ted