[Cryptography] Boing Boing pushing an RSA Conference boycott

[Stephen Farrell]

On 01/14/2014 07:01 AM, ianG wrote:
> 
> ... the IETF.  They have truly not served
> us.  We should have had opportunistic SSL covering the planet by now,
> and that would have been a fantastic defence against the worldwide
> surveillance -- it would have shifted the NSA to an active attack, which
> would have been eventually detected.

TLS has always included anon-dh ciphersuites, going back to 1996
at least. [1] It could be interesting to think about why fewer
protocols wanted to use that, and why its not been implemented
and deployed widely, but its in the protocol and always has been.

> They're still sitting there doing the work of the companies and not the
> work of the people.  What success have the IETF committees brought us,
> other than to surface the corporate wars?

I have no idea what that's supposed to mean, other than
being a pejorative. And 'committees' is plain wrong, IETF
WGs are mailing lists to which anyone can contribute, quite
like this one, but with some more structure because they
exist to produce output. But the IETF is far from perfect
of course.

Anyway, if you want to change the IETF then you can do that
simply by being involved. If you want to just tell the IETF
how to change from the sidelines, then you can even do that,
you've a day and a bit left to submit a position paper. [2]
(I do think it'd be good to have some position papers from
outside the usual consensus so I do mean that.)

S.

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-protocol-00
[2] https://www.w3.org/2014/strint/