[Monotone-devel] Re: Transport encryption

[Bruce Stephens]

Ethan Blanton <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> Unless I'm missing something, using TLS without certificates will
> not give you much security at all ... monotone itself will guarantee
> that there is no man-in-the-middle *changing* your stream, but if
> the encryption isn't authenticated then someone could still be
> *reading* your stream.  In that case, why bother with encryption at
> all.

I think that's right, but that doesn't necessarily rule it out.  As
always, I imagine it depends on your threat model.  If you're worried
about people reading your source using ethereal or something, then an
anonymous cipher would still be valuable.  If you're worried about
MITM, then it wouldn't be useful.

I've never looked at GNU TLS.  Maybe it would be straightforward
enough to change the handshaking to use monotone's existing keys
rather than what it uses now?

Or maybe it's best just to invent something.  That tends not to be
advised, though (it's easy to make a mistake).

[...]