[tor-talk] Thoughts on proxy setup wrt insecure connections

[Lucky Green]

On 2011-02-28 16:05, Joe Btfsplk wrote:
> On 02/28/2011 03:30 PM, Robert Ransom wrote:
>>>
>>> Connections to the plaintext POP3 and IMAP ports may be secured using
>>> the STARTTLS command.
>>
> Where would the "STARTTLS" command be used?
> Would it be a permanent change to some config file (until changed back)
> or used manually on each start?

Joe,
This article is good intro to how the STARTTLS command would be used:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STARTTLS

In short, the client sends the STARTTLS command to the server to
indicate a desire to use TLS encryption for the connection.

STARTTLS is most widely used with SMTP, POP, and IMAP.

The genesis of the STARTTLS command was a realization that the earlier
approaches to adding TLS security to existing TCP protocol-based
services suffered from a systemic flaw: "wrapping" the connection in TLS
and offering the "wrapped" service on a different port in effect
required doubling the number of assigned ports. One port for the
cleartext version, one port for the TLS version.

(This turned out to be less of a problem in practice than anticipated at
the time of the creation of the STARTTLS command, as the growth of
encryption was paralleled by a reduction in ports on which many hosts
connected to the Internet may transmit packets due to ISP level
filtering and the rise of NAT. But that's a discussion for a different
mailing list).

--Lucky