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                        A call for Gemini without TLS

There's currently quite a bit of talk in the Gemini [1] community about
dropping TLS (Transport Layer Security) support, or at least make a non-TLS
version of Gemini available. I find this amusing since the entire reason for
TLS in Gemini in the first place is that the creator of Gemini, solderpunk
[2], wanted to add TLS to gopher [3]. So when he designed Gemini, it started
with TLS at the base. But over the years, the collection of people who want
to remove TLS from Gemini come in two groups. The first group are the ones
that wish to replace TLS with some other encryption scheme, because TLS sucks
or is too complicated or subject to insecurities with the certificate
authorities. As I stated a few weeks ago on Hacker News [4]:

> I think it even applies to “never implement crypto on your own”—are you
> sure you've taken into account side-channel attacks? Timing attacks? Random
> number generation (if it's required)? Cleaning memory after use? That
> memset() isn't optimized out? There's a lot to get right …
>

“https://news.ycombinator .com/item?id=30092091 [5]”

(The whole thread [6] is interesting to read)

I do recall on the Gemini mailing list (when it was available) that one
person said TLS should be replaced, did an actual implementation of an
alternative encryption scheme and decided that wasn't such a good idea after
all. The conversation pretty much died after that (imagine that!).

The second group of anti-TLS people also argue that TLS sucks or is too
complicated or subject to insecurities with the certifacate authories, and
just want TLS removed entirely—go plain text [7]. Well, that currently exists
gopher. It's even easier than Gemini sans TLS—there's no URL (Universal
Resource Locator)s to parse or relative links to resolve. Also, just because
TLS is a third- party library isn't an argument I would make because while
TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) comes with operaing systems today, that
wasn't always the case. Back in the 90s, the entire TCP/IP (Internet
Protocol) stack was at one point a third-party library for the most popular
operating systems that weren't derived from Unix. And today it's the case
that the new Google hotness, QUIC [8], is a protocol only available as a
third-party library. No, a better argument is that current TLS libraries suck
to use, and it's hard to know which ones to use [9]. That agument, I can
sympathize with.

Furthermore, let's say Gemini never specified TLS to begin with. I guarentee
you that someone shortly after it appeared would be screaming for TLS to be
added, because “encrypt all the things! Why didn't you bake in TLS from the
start? Why do you hate us?”

You just can't win here.

[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/1/~solderpunk/
[3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/why-gopher-%20needs-crypto.txt
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30092091
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30091336
[7] gemini://gemini.ctrl-/
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC
[9] gemini://gemini.ctrl-/

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