On Fri, 2004-05-28 at 10:04, David Phillips wrote:
> Bret Baptist writes:
> > To do SSL with IMAP and POP3 you need to use stunnel right now.
> 
> That's actually an advantage.  Why build SSL support into every program when
> it can be handled be a single program?  Separation is good both from an
> engineering and security standpoint.

Because then your daemon only sees connections coming in from localhost,
buggering any kind of logging or access control based on IP or source
port.

Now it would be trivial to just have stunnel output the IP and source
port upon connecting to the wrapped daemon and patch the daemon to use
this information...

... But, SSL is on the way out anyway. TLS is preferred these days and
that can't be implemented by a wrapper.

I think partly the reason more OS software doesn't support SSL/TLS is
that OpenSSL has been the only SSL library around for a while, which has
license problems with GPL software, preventing more widespread use.
Hopefully this will change now that gnutls is apparently usable, there's
also mozilla-nss...

But I think the REAL reason is SSL/TLS is "too hard" to implement.
Clearly there needs to be a simplified library interface to allow basic
encryption to be easily implemented... Is there any really good reason a
TLS library can't be implemented with an API not much more complex than
plain old sockets?


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