Caching encrypted data (Re: Non-persistent Cookie proposal)

Larry Masinter ([email protected])
Sun, 13 Aug 1995 10:29:16 PDT


Koen Holtman said:

> I think the biggest (web) bandwidth eaters today, and in the future,
> will be picture, sound, and mpeg sites. What you should really worry
> about is such sites going commercial and starting to send their stuff
> in an encrypted form to paying customers, not about stateful services
> getting more common. Do you want to stop the development of shttp?

If each item had its own key, caches could cache the encrypted data,
and providers could send the data keys privately to each client in a
separate (non-cached) transaction.

This would allow caches to cache information that was otherwise access
controlled, even though the cache knew nothing about authentication.
This is a big step from the current web architecture, though.