Re: [MLS] Proposal: Proposals (was: Laziness)

[Richard Barnes <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Aug 23, 2019 at 10:21 AM Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
> Hiya,
>
> On 23/08/2019 15:10, Richard Barnes wrote:
> >
> > I'm not clear on what you mean by "meaningfully handled by members".
> >
>
> I'm assuming that MLS protocol data will likely be
> handled by a library. ISTM more likely that such a
> library might default to, or be carelessly used to,
> honor anything the server proposes if this is an MLS
> protocol feature rather than an application layer
> feature. That'd be an example of not meaningfully
> handling this:-) We have seen similar kinds of
> failure with applications and TLS libraries in the
> past where certs aren't checked etc.
>

Oh I see.  That would actually be a pretty difficult policy to implement,
at least without turning off authentication altogether, at least in the
envisioned protocol.  By which I mean:

- Right now, clients are expected to maintain a list of members' signing
keys
- So signers are just indicated by their index in that list
- The obvious way to add non-member signers is to reserve a block of
indices (say 0xFFFFFFxx) that can correspond to application-specific
entities
- Then clients need to get configured with which server keys go with which
reserved indices

Assuming we go in that direction, the natural, "I don't care about
server-initiated stuff" library design would be to just not implement any
special handling for those reserved indices, in which case you'll reject
anything from the server.  I would expect a library that does anything else
to have an API for the configuration required in the last point.

The obvious screw-up case would be, "Treat a signature from the reserved
block as trusted".  But that's actually a little hard to implement; because
the public keys aren't provided, you would have to also not do any
signature verification at all, which means you're now totally open to the
world.  Hopefully that would raise some red flags for developers.

So it's not impossible to screw up, but not trivial either.  At least if
you want to maintain authentication for group members.  If you turn that
off too, I don't think we can save you.

--Richard



>
> I do accept the argument that it can happen at the
> application layer if not defined in the MLS protocol,
> but doing this kind of thing at the application layer
> seems safer to me.
>
> It's also not clear to me that all MLS applications
> would need this feature. (That may be true, I just
> don't know.) If they don't, then again, it seems to
> be more conservative to leave it to applications.
>
> I agree that there are sharp edges however this kind
> of thing is done though.
>
> Cheers,
> S.
>