I was listening to a recent Security Now podcast
that reviewed some important cryptography concepts, when Mr.
Gibson made an interesting point: “let’s assume that we have control of
each end, but we have no control at all of the link between, i.e., the
Internet. So that means that our communication is subject to having
bits dropped, bits added, bits changed, and even bits replayed, things,
packets replayed.” This made me think about how we describe these type of connections, visually.
The picture commonly drawn on a white board
to describe a secure channel over the Internet (and I am guilty of
doing this also) is usually similar to drawing a sheathed wire: the
traffic on the inside, the protective shield of encryption on the
outside. The outside layer protects the inside layer, a.k.a. “crunchy
on the outside, chewy on the inside.”
But perhaps we should focus on
just the endpoints when diagramming a secure
connection (VPN, SSH, etc.) We don’t have any control over what is
done to the traffic between the two parties, so why not draw this
connection as just a single line? Diagramming it as something akin to
a tunnel or coaxial cable may confuse the issue.
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