Impacts of Encryption Everywhere (any solution?)

Mon May 28 16:45:06 UTC 2018

Look at the Steam cache project, the generic downloader can also cache Windows Updates and most gaming services. I imagine Windows Updates would eat a lot of traffic.

https://github.com/steamcache

From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Mike Hammett
Sent: Monday, May 28, 2018 8:23 AM
To: 'NANOG list' <nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: Impacts of Encryption Everywhere (any solution?)

Has anyone outside of tech media, Silicon Valley or academia (all places wildly out of touch with the real world) put much thought into the impacts of encryption everywhere? So often we hear about how we need the best modern encryption on all forms of communication because of whatever scary thing is trendy this week (Russia, NSA, Google, whatever). HTTPS your marketing information and generic education pieces because of the boogeyman!

However, I recently came across a thread where someone was exploring getting a one megabit connection into their village and sharing it among many. The crowd I referenced earlier also believes you can't Internet under 100 megabit/s per home.

Apparently, the current best Internet the residents of the village can get is 40 kilobit/s. Zero oversubscription gets a better service to up to 25 homes. Likely that could be stretched to at least 50 or 100 homes and be better than what they currently have. Forget about streaming video, let's just focus on web browsing and messaging.

However, this could be wildly improved with caching ala squid or something similar. The problem is that encrypted content is difficult to impossible for your average Joe to cache. The rewards for implementing caching are greatly mitigated and people like this must suffer a worse Internet experience because of some ideological high horse in a far-off land.

Some things certainly do need to be encrypted, but encrypting everything means people with limited Internet access get worse performance OR mechanisms have to be out in place to break ALL encryption, this compromising security and privacy when it's really needed.

To circle back to being somewhat on-topic, what mechanisms are available to maximize the amount of traffic someone in this situation could cache? The performance of third-world Internet depends on you.

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Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com<http://www.ics-il.com>

Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com<http://www.midwest-ix.com>