Re: [secdir] Secdir review of draft-ietf-tls-record-limit

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

Thanks Alan,

A few changes based on your feedback here:
https://github.com/tlswg/tls-record-limit/pull/17

On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 9:21 AM, Alan DeKok <[e-mail]> wrote:
>    In particular, it is not appropriate to use the record
>    size limit in place of path MTU detection.
>
> Q: How would that be done?  I don't mean that the document needs to explain how to do something wrong.  I mean that it would be good to explain the misunderstanding which would lead to using record size limit in place of path MTU detection.

How would you mess this up?  Set record_size_limit to your MTU with
the expectation that this is sufficient.  Worse, the expectation that
peer has also done this.

The remainder of the paragraph is intended to make that distinction
clear.  i.e., this limit is inherently fixed by negotiation, the other
is dynamic.

> Comment:  it would be good to give guidance on what to do here, and what happens in error cases.

DTLS (RFC 6347) already has some fairly extensive guidance on PMTUD,
which I didn't want to replicate here.  You hit a lot of the issues in
your questions.  With some better citations, this is what I came up
with:

+The path maximum transmission unit (PMTU) in DTLS also limits the size of
+records.  The record size limit SHOULD be set independently of PMTU.  The
+record size limit is fixed during the handshake and so is best set based on
+constraints at the endpoint and not the current network environment.  In
+comparison, the PMTU is determined by the network path and can change
+dynamically over time.  See {{?PMTU=RFC8201}} and Section 4.1.1.1 of {{?DTLS}}
+for more detail on PMTU discovery.

> Comment: the registry has no "status" column.

Ahh, a problem of concurrent updates.
draft-ietf-tls-iana-registry-updates (which is going out just ahead of
this) adds that column.  I don't think that there was any intention of
creating an explicit dependency, which won't make sense in 5 years
time, but I guess we can add an informational reference.