Miranda and Encryption

Why does Miranda want to use a certificate authority?  Why does Miranda use encryption at all?

Briefly, Miranda uses local certificate authorities to make it cheaper to use and easier to evaluate. Miranda uses encryption because events (messages) may contain things like personally identifiable information or other sensitive information.

The long answers are, well, longer.

First of all, if you don't have a requirement to encrypt things, then you can turn encryption off. Miranda was designed to be used on things like Amazon cloud, however, with traffic potentially going across the internet, so your events (messages) could be sent in the clear.  If you are comfortable with that arrangement, then you can simply turn off encryption.

Miranda uses local certificate authorities because all nodes in the cluster are required to have certificates.  It can quickly get expensive creating CERTs for every node in your cluster, not to mention inconvenient, with that approach.  Instead, you create your own certificate authority and use the local CA to sign all your node keys.

Miranda uses encryption because I found myself in situations where I wished that its predecessor, Prospero, did.  In particular, one of the obstacles to using Prospero in AWS was its lack of support for encryption.  Another problem was crossing availability zones.  If we had a node on the West coast, and another on the East coast, then they would probably talk across the internet.

As far as what to use, I thought SSL/TLS with their wide use, would be well supported, secure, cheap, and easy to use.  While they are indeed well supported, secure and inexpensive I have not found SSL/TLS to be at all easy to use.  I have run across a problem that has forced me to do all my development work "in the clear."  I refer to the dreaded "Invalid signature" problem that I posted on Stack Overflow about.

At any rate, that is why Miranda uses local certificate authorities and encryption in general.

All hail netty!