sulli's Journal: Whatever happened to...

opportunistic encryption? The idea that hosts communicating with each other can encrypt data by default, and automatically, even if they don't previously know each other?

With the latest (admittedly unsurprising) revelations of illegal spying on US citizens by the NSA, I wonder if this shouldn't make a comeback, and perhaps be added to applications like mail, IM, etc. Per the above RFC it is being proposed for IKE, but this requires host-to-host IP connectivity. Is any progress being made on the same for generally used applications?

Well...

[ryanr]

It kinda depends on IPSec, which sucks... and kinda assumed IPv6 would be rolled out by now... yadda yadda...

You get partially there with SSL/TLS.