A new Internet Draft called Effect of Ubiquitous Encryption by Kathleen Moriarty and Al Morton describes the hurdles on the way to ubiquitous use of encryption for all Internet traffic.

It is a first draft (intended to eventually become an Informational RFC), but already contains many interesting insights. Some current practices, such as virus scanning by means of a proxy (“middlebox”) or data collection for statistics, may have to be redesigned when more traffic is end-to-end encrypted and its contents thus cannot be inspected.

The authors request feedback and suggestions for additional issues.