Re: Report on preliminary decision on TLS 1.3 and client auth

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On 25 September 2015 at 03:14, Poul-Henning Kamp <[e-mail]> wrote:
> What I tried to say above is that we don't know which cookie
> identifies the session.

That's definitely true.  Cookies are a pretty crude tool for something
like this.

I think that your general observation about client certificates is
overwhelmingly true.  On the web at least, I'm seeing a general trend
away from using the TLS layer to authenticate clients.  If cookies are
crude, client certificates make them look like a picture of
sophistication by comparison.  As you say, they are a poor fit for
both the protocol and the architecture.

What I neglected to mention earlier is that client certificate
mechanism that was being added was viewed more as a necessary evil
than an important feature.  No one liked having to do this, but as
Mark pointed out, there are far more people relying on having the
functionality than we previously thought.

I'd like to find other solutions for the use cases that drive this,
but the view was that we still needed something like this so that we
don't strand those users on old protocols.  We don't have to *like* it
though.

There was strong agreement that this feature would be accompanied by a
prominent and severe admonishment against using it.  I definitely want
to talk about what the alternatives look like, but perhaps we should
start a separate thread on that subject.