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Re: [quicwg/base-drafts] Recommended response for empty packets (#1835)

Kazuho Oku <notifications@github.com> Fri, 05 October 2018 14:22 UTC

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Subject: Re: [quicwg/base-drafts] Recommended response for empty packets (#1835)
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I might argue that there is possibly a security implication on allowing empty packets.

If we allow the receiver to handle an empty packet as non-error, the endpoint might be tempted to skip verifying the AEAD tag, because it can be sure that there is no payload once it decrypts the packet number. This is obviously incorrect, because the AEAD tag is the only thing we have in protection against packet injection.

Requiring the sender to always send a non-empty payload and also requiring the receiver to return an error in case it sees an empty payload is one way to resolve such concern.

I might agree that the concern is not really that practical, but OTOH, I think implementing the rule is near to zero-cost as well.

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