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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Myself, I like the idea of opportunistic encryption. Why not require TLS for HTTP/2 but don't require authentication for http:// URLs?

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It's hard to see what benefit that would offer. Non-authenticated TLS is trivially vulnerable to MITM attacks. This is especially the case because I can't foresee a situation in which a website would put the effort in to implement opportunistic TLS, but not implement straightforward authenticated HTTPS…

It completely prevents passive surveillance, however. Sure, you can MITM, but the point is now to look at anything you have to do an MITM attack, unlike now, where most traffic is unencrypted and you can do surveillance passively. This makes surveillance more difficult. Net gain for everyone.

I'll concede that passive surveillance would not be possible. However, I think that benefit is marginal - AFAIK, unencrypted support in HTTP2 is optional and won't be supported by browsers in any case.

Non-authenticated TLS is trivially vulnerable to MITM attacks.

I don't think a well-implemented TOFU/POP policy would be "trivially vulnerable", but it would still accommodate self-signing. Standardizing this would have been a worthy goal for IETF.

I'd argue that even if it is MITM-vulnerable, it's still very useful, as it makes passive surveillance impossible.

This article has a great response to that argument: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/07/28/Privacy-E...

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