Re: [dns-privacy] draft-ietf-dprive-dtls-and-tls-profiles: strict privacy

[Bob Harold <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 6:21 AM, Sara Dickinson <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
> > On 27 Oct 2016, at 19:28, Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> > I will admit that I thought there was just one bottom level of OS in our
> discussion, cleartext. If there are two (cleartext; no communication), the
> document needs more discussion in multiple places because it would be
> surprising to any implementer who didn't follow the long discussion during
> the end stages of RFC 7435.
>
> As the draft stands it is clear about what Strict is and allows for all
> flavours of OS, essentially leaving it as an implementation choice. If,
> because of the nature of DNS, the feeling is it makes more sense that
> Opportunistic _always_ falls back to clear text in order to get service
> then I can see the value in that. It is just a question of spelling this
> out clearly in the draft.
>
> > Which users do we think would not want to negotiate weak TLS (such as
> DES-MD2) but would be willing to go to cleartext? For other than crypto
> experts (who are likely to only want Strict), how would weak TLS be worse
> than cleartext?
>
> There was some discussion in Buenos Aires (I think) about an intermediate
> ‘Relaxed’ mode where a client is willing to use a (weakly) encrypted
> connection but not willing to fallback to clear text so as to have some
> protection against passive monitoring. But IIRC the consensus was ‘keep it
> simple, Strict or Opportunistic’.
>
> For me the other ‘intermediate’ case I was really thinking of in the
> hard-fail case for Opportunistic is when the client does have
> authentication information configured (as opposed to having none) but the
> authentication fails. Should there be scope for the client to decide in
> that case that something is wrong enough it doesn't want to continue? As
> you say, maybe this is complicating the picture too much.
>
> Sara.
>
>
In Section 5 on Opportunistic Privacy, I am not sure "MAY" is correct.  If
the user chooses Opportunistic, I would think the server MUST try to be
secure, in whatever ways are possible, but MAY fall back to less secure,
only if those fail.

-- 
Bob Harold