14 DAY TRIAL // The US National Security Agency is supposed to ensure the safety of American citizens, but there's an ongoing scandal about it overstepping its bounds by spying on both its own citizens and those of other countries. A certain group of engineers says it has the solution though: total web encryption.
This must be one of the clearest examples of extremes in recent history. On the one hand you have a spy agency that ignores all rules of propriety, and on the other you get IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force, who wants to encrypt all Internet traffic to prevent that from happening again.
IETF is an informal organization of engineers that change Internet code and manipulate HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) according to a rather rough consensus between them.
The people making up IETF want to encrypt all web traffic as a default, and are actually quite frantic in their efforts to include something of the sort in the next iteration of HTTP, HTTP 2.0.
Stephen Farrell, a computer scientist at Trinity College in Dublin who is part of the project, used “very frantically” when describing the activities.
And since he himself, is a member of IETF, we can safely assume he knows what he's talking about.
Currently, there are websites that encrypt content, but many don't. The way to know which is which is to check and see whether they use normal HTTP protocol or HTTPS, which uses transport layer security.
Banks, e-commerce websites, Google, Facebook, and other large sites use HTTPS, but IETF feels it's not enough.
The engineer group hopes to have a specification finalized by the end of 2014, but ultimately it will fall to websites themselves to adopt the technology.
Now we just have to wonder if NSA will really fail to include a backdoor in HTTP 2.0 like it did in everything else of relevance.