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

[Jeffrey M. Vinocur]

On May 27, 2005, at 6:49 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> Sure, encryption and decryption on fat pipes is expensive.
> That's a well understood problem where I work. But is
> there anything specific to NNTP in this observation? Why would
> NNTP deserve a get out of jail card, and not other
> applications protocols?

Most web traffic goes unencrypted...why not require that HTTPS be used 
universally?

In that case, just like NNTP, there's a tremendous amount of data that 
is already public knowledge and encrypting it would provide minimal 
gain.  Sure, NNTP sometimes requires passwords to initiate a session -- 
but given the expense you describe above, commercial providers are wary 
of applying encryption to an entire multi-gigabyte datastream to 
protect the first few dozen bytes.


-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org