Re: Benjamin Kaduk's Discuss on draft-ietf-httpbis-semantics-16: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

Hi Ben,

> On 17 Jun 2021, at 6:39 am, Benjamin Kaduk via Datatracker <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> DISCUSS:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Thank you for this quite masterfully done mammoth undertaking!  I expect
> to ballot Yes pending discussion of one point.
> 
> I'm looking at the following text in Section 4.3.4 relating to how to
> handle certificate validation failures for https:
> 
>   If the certificate is not valid for the URI's origin server, a user
>   agent MUST either notify the user (user agents MAY give the user an
>   option to continue with the connection in any case) or terminate the
>   connection with a bad certificate error.  [...]
> 
> Given the discussion up in §3.5 about requirements to "notify" the user
> vs requiring "confirmation" from the user, I don't think that just "MUST
> notify the user" is sufficient to prevent the user-agent from
> continuing, since it is sufficient to just write a log entry as the
> means to notify the user.  Is the intent to require confirmation of the
> action to continue in the face of such an error (which, again per §3.5
> could be a pre-configured confirmation)?  An intent to require
> "confirmation" (vs mere "notification") seems consistent with the
> subsequent text placing requirements on automated clients and would be
> more consistent with my understanding of general IETF consensus for
> securing protocols

Good catch. I think that 'notify the user' --> 'obtain confirmation from the user' is the right change here (possibly with a reference to 3.5).

Anyone disagree?

Cheers,


--
Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/