Industry Concerns about TLS 1.3

Where have the banks been?

Why didn't this Andrew Kennedy guy (or any other banks) chime in when this was fresh?

Why did this only become relevant to them at the last minute? Forgive me, but I have no sympathy for these institutions. If they really cared about Security, they would have dealt with this nonsense a long time ago.

You want to excuse the banks because they are "big businesses [that] have regulations you don't understand or even care about", but for institutions where security is of critical importance, why haven't they been following this more closely?

This a case of pure neglect and greed.

Good luck using them in the United States.

> that was phased out years ago

Where do you live? There have been chip-only debit cards all around the world, but I am not aware of anywhere in the world where they have chip-only credit cards (except maybe in Korea, not sure).

Good luck showing up at a hotel without a credit card, or good luck trying to rent a car.

> my cards all require a second-factor for all online transactions.

Good God, what annoyance. My banks also tried to offer me this "service". I am sure going to wake up in the middle of the night just to approve Amazon's request to take my money for some product that I ordered during the day.

Not to mention the whole plethora of online services I use that charge me monthly at random times.

Looking at my CC bills, I use CCs online multiple times a day. I'm so happy I don't have to approve each one of those. Good thing I could opt-out of 3DSecure too, which in the case of my bank uses SMS, which never arrives in time (or at all) while I am abroad.

> An inconvenience that is only required because the security of your cards is less than optimal.

There's no inconvenience. Even ignoring security, not having multiple cards and multiple banks is completely unresponsible. It increases availability for so many reasons. The security aspect of it is just bonus.

What is inconvenient is not being able to buy stuff in the US, or rent hotels and cars. Different people have very different definitions of inconvenient, I guess.

I think there could be a security gain though in adding support for a better way to actively MITM TLS traffic though - in having a proper mechanism for filtering proxy firewalls. For some applications (say, school networks) it is OK to monitor and filter traffic, but the way it is done now is terrible for security. Usually this is by terminating the TLS at the proxy, scanning it, and then re-encrypting it with an certificate automatically generated and trusted by an internal CA (whose root certificate is installed on the machines).

The huge problem is that now everyone has to trust all the root CAs installed on the firewall, instead of being able to decide which ones to trust themselves. The firewall has to also decide whether or not to trust self-signed certificates.

Much better would be to be able to decrypt, re-encrypt with a certificate issued by a real CA, and then also send the original certificate along with the handshake. Then, the first time you visited a TLS site, it could pop up a big warning saying 'This traffic is intercepted by firewall.institution.edu, do you consent?' and have a little exclamation mark in the toolbar to always indicate that it's being intercepted. The browser would have to trust both the interception certificate (which encrypts between the firewall and the endpoint inside the internal network) as well as getting the original certificate and deciding whether to trust that (which you don't get now).

If the banks do this, it's their problem, and I hope the regulators will be very unhappy about it. There is no need to make the defaults less secure for billions of people in order to make it slightly cheaper for a few large corporations to implement an obviously correct alternative.