[throwaway458864]

If we didn't have the web, all networking above OSI L4 on all operating systems would have been encrypted by default. A simple set of syscalls and kernel features could have enabled it. But since the web was there, and popularized a solution for secure communications (TLS + HTTP), everyone just jumped on that bandwagon, and built skyscrapers on top of a used books store.

The weird irony is it's the old "worse is better" winning again. HTTP and TLS are fairly bad protocols, in their own ways. But put them together and they're better than whatever else exists. It's just too bad we didn't keep them and ditch the browser.

[phicoh]

Assuming you are talking about IPSEC, that uses a model that is very hard to deploy.

The problem is that applications typically use TCP connections, but IPSEC works at the IP level. Early on, the (BSD socket) kernel API was basically fixed at the IP level instead of associating it with a TCP socket.

So the whole thing became too complex (also for other reasons). So SSL and SSH were created to have simple things that worked.

SSL took many iterations to get any kind of security, so IPSEC had plenty of time to get it right and take over. But as far as I know, there just never happened. It also doesn't help that TLS is trivial to combine with NAT, and for IPSEC that is quite tricky.

[tptacek]

Can you articulate what you believe is bad about TLS?

[tsimionescu]

Isn't the Linux kernel at least very unhappy with the idea of adding encryption logic inside, especially in a way where they expose this to user space?