Re: [hybi] Why not just use ssh?

[Adam Barth <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 10:49 PM, Willy Tarreau <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 08:40:45PM -0400, John Tamplin wrote:
>> On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 8:26 PM, Adam Barth <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> > Why?  There are a number of compelling technical reasons to prefer the
>> > TLS-based handshake.  The counter arguments appear to be entirely
>> > non-technical.
>>
>> I don't know -- does changing the typical total frame header size
>> after RoHC from 7 bytes to 22 count as a technical argument?  With a
>> large number of frames likely being a few dozen bytes after
>> compression, that seems significant.  The requirement for any
>> implementation to include TLS libraries also seems to be a technical
>> argument.
>
> I'd like to add that the WG's goal is to achieve interoperability, and
> that's not only based on technical arguments. With TLS, an administrator
> can't analyze traffic. That's very important in schools for example, and
> some large enterprises, where the policy is simple : either you can
> analyze and filter, or you block. While I'm very favorable to a TLS
> version, I'd really like to have an HTTP one too. For this reason, I
> think we should ensure the handshake is simple enough to limit misuses,
> and looks a lot like HTTP so that it does not create a new attack
> vector. After all, the WS clients will be the browsers. They already
> have access to the net (direct or via proxies), and what we should be
> concerned about is that we can't do with WS what we can't already do
> with HTTP.
>
> So in my opinion, trying to stop protocol attacks before the handshake
> is complete is a waste of time since the HTTP vector is still available,
> however we have to ensure we won't complete the handshake on a non-WS
> server. For that use, I think that the nonce, whatever its form (possibly
> a WS ping+pong) is very important.

We're just going in circles.  You've made all these points before.

Adam