Re: [TLS] Publication of draft-rhrd-tls-tls13-visibility-00

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

> On 24 Oct 2017, at 22:54, David A. Cooper <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Why would these schools settle for a half measure that only allows them to snoop on traffic between their students and servers provide the keys to their Internet traffic to the schools? If a school wants to snoop on its students' traffic, it would do so in a much easier way than using draft-rhrd-tls-tls13-visibility, in the same way that some enterprises today use middleboxes to inspect all outgoing traffic.

Yeah. I used to write such middleboxes. They’re a nightmare to deploy in all but the most orderly of enterprises. You need to have all clients trust the middlebox CA. Fine, so the Windows computers get that installed through SMS or GPO or whatever the central configuration feature is called these days. The people with Macs have to figure it out for themselves, and the same goes for people with phones. Oh, and also for people who use Firefox, because that browser comes with its own trust store. The people on this list can probably figure it out with a little web search. A school with a thousand students all bringing their own devices? Good luck.

> This browser that students would be required to use would be one that has a CA controlled by the middlebox installed as a trust anchor. Whenever one of the students' clients tries to connect to an external secure site, the middlebox-controlled CA issues a certificate for that site so that the connection can be terminated at the middlebox. The middlebox then establishes a secure connection with the end server, thus setting up the middlebox as a MiTM.

It’s one thing to say that SchoolBrowser (conveniently located in the app stores of all phone and computer OS-es) works in this school (and all the others).  It’s a totally different thing to fill the app stores with “GrizzlyBrowser for Logan High School students” and “MustangBrowser for Mountain Crest High School students"

> There are already middleboxes on the market today that do this. They work for all outgoing connections and don't require any cooperation whatsoever from the outside servers that the clients are trying to connect to, and only expert users would notice the presence of the MiTM.

Unless they had to configure their browser themselves.  The support costs of these is tremendous.