[NNTP] Re: Comments on draft-ietf-nntp-tls-nntp-05.txt

[Russ Allbery]

EKR <ekr at networkresonance.com> writes:
> Ken Murchison <ken at oceana.com> wrote:

>> Coming from the email world, I tried to argue this same point, but was
>> told that given the sheer volume of NNTP traffic, using TLS for an
>> entire session is unrealistic in the real world.  Feel free to search
>> the list archives or renew this discussion.

> Yes, I recall repeated vigorous assertions to this effect, combined with
> fairly small amounts of data.

I believe Andrew Gierth had concrete data in this area.

Note that one of the reasons why encryption gets odd reactions from the
NNTP community is that, unlike e-mail, all of the data except for the
authentication is public in some of our most common use cases.  This is
not, itself, a reason to not do encryption (the performance impact is
really the thing to worry about), but it feels intuitively weird to bother
encrypting the contents of public Usenet hierarchies.

Since there is no server-maintained persistant client state in NNTP, the
only risk of session hijacking is possibly being able to inject posts with
the authentication credentials of another user or being able to read
private hierarchies if there are any (on many news servers, there aren't
any that warrant any special precautions), neither of which are
particularly significant risks for most NNTP deployments.

Now there most certainly *are* NNTP deployments for which those are
significant risks.  Please don't read this as implying that NNTP never
cares.  It's just that the highest volume NNTP deployments tend to also be
the ones whose data warrants the least protection.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>