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Eventually you run into issues with your stack being incompatible with the rest of the world.

Your 20 year old debian won't be able to provide a TLS stack that is compatible with any modern browsers. And you could argue that this is still a "security backport", but backporting a new TLS version isn't like your garden-variety buffer overflow backport patch.




The TLS treadmill + certificate authority lists are antithetical to stability.

HTTP + merkle-tree based integrity checking + having the merkle root in DNS could be way more stable. Even the the SHA1 deprecation would barely affect this, as long as you're not using the hash tree to vouch for content provided by 3rd parties collision attacks don't matter.


Ok but once you have integrity, how do you open a private channel with the website ? You do need TLS, or something akin to that, somewhere. And like all crypto stacks, holes are found and change still needs to happen.


> How do you open a private channel with the website ?

I wasn't assuming you would. That's one of the things that have to go on the chopping block if long-term stability is the goal.


You can make computers even more stable by casting them in concrete and dropping them in the sea.

Do you genuinely think people want computers that cannot be used to read email, do online banking, buy things with, watch Netflix, and so on?


Forget the whole PKI infrastructure, the OpenSSL in your 20 year old Debian wouldn't have AES. You'd be using DES, 3DES or RC4.


I don't think you understand the problem.

The protocol has the security bug. The protocol needs to be changed to fix the security bug. The old stuff stops being able to talk with new stuff.

That's the problem poster above was talking about.

Cert authorities are relatively much simpler problem to solve as it is just few files to update


What makes you think we'll still be using X25519 in 50 years? I'm pretty sure we'll have human level AGI by then and there's a decent chance that large orgs will have quantum computers too


I haven't mentioned X25519 anywhere.


What's the point of all that "merkle-tree based integrity checking + having the merkle root in DNS" without key exchange like X25519


The ancient server box doesn't need to do that. Publishing the hashes to DNS can happen somewhere else. And the clients would have to trust their local resolver if they don't want to do the validation themselves.


Heh the only thing I use HTTP for that's compatible with your model is browsing Wikipedia, but I've already got a local copy of Wikipedia on my phone so it's hard for me to imagine why anyone would want to use your model.

> trust their local resolver

No thanks. There was a time when software would trust devices on the LAN. I'm not going back to the dark ages




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