Re: [9fans] Secure ftp Again

[Russ Cox <russcox@gmail.com>]

> If one were going to add TLS dialing as a standard facility, I'd
> suggest adding it to cs, not dial, perhaps as a qualifier similar to
> "!r": tcp!host!ftp!tls.  This would make TLS dialing available
> uniformly and immediately to all programs, without recompilation, and
> even to command-line usage.

since icann has deprecated having separate
"automatically start tls after connecting" tcp ports
for services, tweaking any of these is not very useful.
for example (and this was my point earlier, which
i did not make very clearly) in ftp you have to
send an "AUTH TLS" and have the server send back
a success response before you start tls.  other
protocols have similar protocol-specific negotiation
phases.

also, adding it to cs requires having /net/tcp understand
the !tls qualifier (cs just passes !r into the tcp dial string),
which would mean having the gory public-key certificate
etc. part of tls in the kernel (or in a separate user-space
network stack).

russ