Re: Quic: the elephant in the room

[Michael Thomas <[e-mail]>]

On 4/11/21 12:11 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> I made essentially the same argument to people at Google BEFORE the 
> DANE group was ever proposed. The answer they gave me then has not 
> changed.
>
> DANE was chartered over a decade ago. Individuals in that group made 
> clear that no input was going to be accepted from anyone who was a 
> part of the WebPKI world. The tactics used were intentionally 
> exclusionary. Those of us pointing out the limitations of the proposed 
> approach were never given a fair hearing.
>
> It is now ten years since DANE was chartered. DANE has failed beyond 
> the very limited application to SMTP which was never really covered. 
> The argument for DANE was weak before LetsEncrypt was launched and it 
> seems highly unlikely future events are going to change that.
>
>
> The TLSA model is simply the wrong model. If you want to change 
> the way discovery is done, you need to think about the full discovery 
> chain. And not least because DOH is another factor in this mix.
>
> DANE and DPRIV should have all been a part of one effort that should 
> have included the introduction of SRV records for HTTP.
>
> The key weakness in the DNS protocol is that the client-resolver 
> interaction is of an entirely different character to 
> resolver-authoritative and the current client-resolver interaction 
> only supports requests for one record at a time.
>
>
> The kick off meeting for DPRIV was quite interesting. There should be 
> standing IESG instructions to prohibit chartering of any WG that is 
> premised on the need to finish something in a year, so it is essential 
> that it be done in exactly the way the proposers have already decided. 
> Even more so when the results from DPRIV could be easily foreseen from 
> the fact it was the same group that had hijacked DNS security policy 
> with DANE.
>
> I don't claim to always do the right thing but there are some folk who 
> seem to keep doing the same thing with the same outcome and for some 
> reason they get priority over folk who have actually built stuff that 
> was successfully deployed and is in use.
>
We already have a widely adopted example where we ignored the webpki 
folks too: DKIM. Certs are simply not needed in the vast majority of 
cases. DKIM could be adapted for this too, and doesn't have the downside 
of a new RR type which is always problematic. I assume that the people 
doing DANE were looking at DKIM's success as a template. Quite 
reasonably, IMO.

And I don't know how something that could reduce the message count to 
the original 3 way handshake is somehow the "wrong model". In what way? 
Is DKIM the wrong model too?

My larger point is that a Google-like company could and should run 
experiments to reduce the message count to 3 again to finish off what 
Quic is trying to accomplish. That is achievable, the only question is 
whether it's worth it which experiments would show.

Mike