I wasn't suggesting that because TLS is as you say "creaky an scary looking" I'm going to go off and write something from scratch. I think a good job has been done of making developers fear writing their own cryptosystems.
What I'm wondering is if there's any serious effort out there that could in the near future replace TLS? Like the article was saying, NIST has promoted new crypto primitives, who can be trusted to create the next generation of crypto systems?
Browsers are going to rely on a secure transport that features a directory-style PKI and session resumption for the foreseeable future --- CA's aren't going anywhere, and handling millions of inbound connections is going to be a requirement.
As long as we need a directory-based PKI and a session feature, what complexity can we really cut out of TLS? The record layer is sane and simple; it's more than HTTPS needs, but isn't hard to implement. The handshake is complicated, but it's complicated because it addresses 15+ years of downgrade attacks.
After thinking about that, ask, what's the real benefit of having two (really three, including SSH) mainstream encrypted transports? No matter what happens in any other protocol, a vulnerability in the transport used by browsers is going to be a hair-on-fire emergency. So why not just have everyone use the transport the browser uses?
The last point I'd make is, it's 2013. SSL 3.0 goes back to, what, 1996? The vulnerabilities we're finding in SSL are protocol flaws, and they've taken more than a decade to surface. Who feels better about new protocols?
What I'm wondering is if there's any serious effort out there that could in the near future replace TLS? Like the article was saying, NIST has promoted new crypto primitives, who can be trusted to create the next generation of crypto systems?