BetterPrivacy - necessary?

Jim Jimmymac at copper.net
Sat Oct 2 06:11:20 UTC 2010


grarpamp wrote:
> As usual, it would be awesome to have a tool that could de and re
> encapsulate https so that proxies and caches could do their thing with it.

I am very far from an expert in these matters, but it would seem to me 
that the ability to do so without the explicit cooperation of the 
browser (or other client) would indicate that your attempt at end-to-end 
encryption was hopelessly broken.  If you could de/re-encapsulate then 
so could any other man-in-the-middle, and you would never be the wiser.

But I do understand the usefulness of what you suggest.  The only way I 
can see of doing it that had any possibility of being secure would be if 
A) your proxy/cache handled the real end-to-end 
encryption/authentication with the website, and B) there was a plugin 
(or built-in functionality) on the browser that maintained a secure AND 
AUTHENTICATED connection with the proxy/cache.  I.e. the browser would 
have to be aware of what was going on and would suspend its verification 
of the website's certificate while insisting that it authenticate that 
it was talking to the approved proxy/cache which is tasked with the 
secure communication to the website. If the proxy/cache detected a 
problem with the website's certificate, then it would have to have a way 
of signalling this, perhaps just by serving up its own page with the 
relevant information.

That's the best I can come up with.  Comments?

Jim



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