Re: TO COMPRESS OR NOT TO CMPRS (please reply)

[Bob Monsour <[e-mail]>]

At 04:05 PM 2/18/97 -0500, Steven Bellovin wrote:
...snip
>Compression is useful for the ``last mile'' -- the local connection,
>which is often dial-up, and hence limited to ~28.8Kbps.  It might
>be interesting to look at the packet size and type distributions,
>to see just what it would buy us.  After all, GIF files are not
>compressible, and I suspect that by volume they make up a large
>percentage of traffic over dial-up links.  (N.B.  I'm not trying
>to be snide about people's viewing habits; I'm alluding to the cute
>little pictures that seem to infest most Web pages...)

Steve,

While GIF files do likely make up a large percentage of traffic over
dial-up links, I don't imagine that security functionality will be
enabled/negotiated while viewing web pages. I would expect that security
functionality would be engaged when tunneling into the corporate network
over the internet. If you get your web access after establishing this
tunnel and thus using the corporate net connection, then indeed the web
pages would be encrypted (and optionally compressed), but I would think
that once you're connected to your local ISP and have established the
tunnel, you would just use the ISP to get your web access, thus only
encrypting the "corporate" data traveling between the client and the
corporate network. Corrections to my thinking?

-Bob