Addressing Visibility Challenges with TLS 1.3 Within the Enterprise

This is an odd euphemism. A network that uses plaintext isn't "visible" - I'd use a word like "readable" or "inspectable".

For encrypted networks, MITMing the encryption breaks the security. That's what it's for. TLS1.3 is supposed to prevent that; circumventing that (as NIST proposes) increases the attack surface. NIST's proposals seem to amount to generating and distributing ephemeral keys over the internal network; but I thought best practice was to keep keys and cryptographic operations inside a HSM.

Isn't the proper solution to remove MITMing from the compliance rules, stop trying to detect C2 and malware at the router, and instead secure the target servers?

All of this seems to assume you always own the server side, which you pretty much don't. Even on page 5 with the summary of the solution it doesn't touch that subject.

You'd think that if you own the server and the client anyway, you'd just capture it right there if you need to.

As for just the DH 'server' doing key distribution, that's something we already know how to do and doesn't require "we install nginx on a random server and call it an appliance" style vendors.

It seems to be intentional exfiltration of key material (either bounded DH keypairs rather than ephemeral or, more likely, exfil of the symmetric channel key).

TLS also allows a so-called "tech" company to send and receive data over someone else's private, local network that is connected to the internet with the confidence that computer users and the network owner on that local network cannot see the contents of the traffic. In order to properly consent to sending data to a so-called "tech" company, it is arguable that the consent should be informed, i.e., the computer user should be able to see what data is being sent. Was the concealment of unconsented data exfiltration the intended purpose of TLS. These so-called "tech" companies have a record of breaching public trust, hiding their surreptitious data collection from public view, in order to generate revenue and profit. This is often made the subject of civil lawsuits and regulatory fines that are rarely if ever successfully challenged. The companies almost invariably give in and pay up.

Can't enterprises just MITM the traffic and sign it with a CA the clients trust? What's the benefit of the previous solutions?

(I tried eying through the OP but my eyes started bleeding from all the corporate IT jargon.)

"Addressing Visibility Challenges" is a masterpiece of bloviating Orwellian sophistry to describe the bare, brute contradiction now at the heart of "Enterprise"; that we want confidentially but we don't want confidentiality.

It's encrypted so you don't get visibility. End of. Sort out your trust models, Sort out your end points. Sort of the principles behind your endpoints (viz. loyalty, training etc).

The solution: a "five volume" guide to how you can have something and not have it at the same time. This is an industry openly at war with itself.

Citation needed. Why do they need to compromise network security instead of doing it on the endpoints? Because they paid for expensive, crappy, software that can't do that? Sounds like their problem.

> The latest internet security protocol, known as TLS 1.3, makes it more challenging to comply with these requirements while maintaining web traffic security.

Good! This is important. Far more important than some orgs needing to buy new software licenses.

The law requires certain things. If your protocol doesn't account for those things, then your protocol will be broken to bend to the law's will. It would often be much better to have some small compromise in privacy, rather than lose it all. "All or nothing" has some extreme outcomes.

Yes, some people do want privacy at all costs. But what about the rest of us? We send postal mail in envelopes and leave them sitting in boxes open to the street. Our phone calls traverse networks unencrypted and are overhead nearby. Our credit cards and secret PINs can be input at public facilities that enable stealing. Our laptops sit at home or work and can be broken into and memory dumped for encryption keys. In practice, 99% of us are completely fine with an acceptable risk of a possible loss of privacy. We help bolster this with laws and punishments should someone violate our privacy. But what we don't do is engineer our lives as if we're all spies hiding from an execution.

There are practical changes that could be made to allow for better functionality, whilst not having absolute privacy at every conceivable technical level, but still more than enough privacy that what we care about most is still reasonably private. Then there might be enough mild privacy lost to enable organizations the functionality they need, and we would lose less to the "all or nothing" consequences.

The thing is, there is an extremely small number of people who have the privilege and power to change things, because they're in the room and we're not. Like the generals carving up Africa because they happen to be in the right room. Personally, I think these decisions have fallen to a few people in a room for far too long. I think we should have public, wide ranging discussions about the nature of how we build the underpinnings of our world. If we don't, the consequences could be more "all-or-nothing" that ends up harming more than otherwise.