Comment by jka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jka | Hacker News Reader

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It's generally not a model that has much supportive mindshare for the web currently, but it is possible to achieve tamper-prevention without requiring the content of communications to be encrypted.

For example, most official Debian[1] and Ubuntu[2] package repositories currently use HTTP (not HTTPS) by default for content retrieval.

That's reliable thanks to public-key encryption; the packages are signed, and the receiver verifies the signature.

Someone able to inspect your network traffic could, for example, tell that you've downloaded a genuine copy of "cowsay". Or they could detect that the server replied with a tampered copy (something that your client should reject as invalid).

[1] - https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList#Example_sources.list

[2] - https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/package-management

Systems that are older than general SSL and TLS usage do indeed have those features, but they are mostly unsuitable for the majority of internet users.

Sadly, it could have been better with varying options of choices in connection, stream and content encryption methods, but that simply isn't feasible with the users and scale we're currently working with.

For niches (and operating systems and software packages are niches, even if an end user is somewhere under the hood using it) it can still be pretty good, especially considering the mirror system where you distribute files to mirrors which might themselves use TLS but you'd still want the distribution authority to be the only one signing those files.

Adding to that: just slapping HTTPS on those connections still would prevent an observer from detecting you downloading cowsay. IIRC every package has a fairly unique size and unless you add padding that is enough metadata to figure out with reasonable certainty which package you requested. So it’s not like HTTPS would add any immediate benefit anyway.

> For example, most official Debian[1] and Ubuntu[2] package repositories currently use HTTP (not HTTPS) by default for content retrieval.

But then you've bootstrapped the trust somehow. If you were to download an ISO from that not-HTTPS website, you'd be at risk.

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