Re: ALPN support for GnuTLS connections

["Björn Bidar" <bjorn.bidar@thaodan.de>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
> ALPN sounds useful and a good thing for Emacs to support.
> But could you tell me a little more about this point?
>
>   > For a service provider who makes it possible to access PostgreSQL
>   > over the internet, there are many benefits to the new ALPN-based mechanism, such
>   > as allowing the use of commercial “TLS gateways” (that do no application-level
>   > processing) as entrypoints to their network. I expect that over time, an
>   > increasing proportion of internet services will require ALPN.
>
> What is a TLS gateway, and what would a usage scenario look like?
> Who would choose to use one -- would it be the server, or the client?
>
> In particular, if you are running your own server and you could set up
> whatever network access methods you like, why would someone use a
> "gateway" to talk with your server?  And presuming a decision to do
> that, why would someone want to use a "commercial" one?

A gateway can be something simple as a webserver as reverse proxy that protects a
program that can't do load balancing, does do tls or any other reason
why the application HTTP server shouldn't be exposed directly to the
internet.