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

[Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]>]

Thanks, Martin!

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Thomson [mailto:[e-mail]]
Sent: 06 March 2018 09:42
To: Hannes Tschofenig
Cc: Benjamin Kaduk; Alan DeKok; [e-mail]; IESG; [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Secdir review of draft-ietf-tls-record-limit

Just to follow-up. I think that removing the "especially handshake messages" will help resolve this.  This implies that handshake messages are always unprotected, which is not the case.

The change that I propose:

-RecordSizeLimit value it receives from its peer.  Unprotected messages - -handshake messages in particular - are not subject to this limit.
+RecordSizeLimit value it receives from its peer.  Unprotected messages
+are not subject to this limit.


On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 3:51 AM, Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]> wrote:
> I believe we are on the same page with regards to this issue.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Martin Thomson [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: 04 March 2018 23:03
> To: Hannes Tschofenig
> Cc: Benjamin Kaduk; Alan DeKok; [e-mail];
> IESG; [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: Secdir review of draft-ietf-tls-record-limit
>
> On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 2:57 AM, Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> [Hannes] I am not sure I fully understand the approach. Even if
>> someone uses TCP a RAM limitation will not go away. TCP is likely to
>> make the situation worse since it requires some amount of RAM as well
>> even with the best possible configuration. (There is this work in
>> LWIG on TCP implementation guidance where the authors are supposed to
>> provide some information about the actual RAM usage of various TCP
>> features and settings.)
>
> Let me try to explain more.
>
> An endpoint that can't handle a big packet (whether that be a big TCP segment or a big UDP datagram) can always pretend that this is a link issue and send the appropriate ICMP message.  That limits the size of packets they receive, at least to the point that the minimum for the IP version in use is reached (576 for v4, 1280 for v6).  I'm not sure what fragmentation does here, other than make things far worse.
>
> If there are multiple packets arriving and no space for more than one, then the endpoint can pretend that it didn't receive the packet.  TCP also has ACKs, which the endpoint can withhold until it has space.
>
> Thus, the endpoint can hold as little as a single MTU of data at once.
> Given that it is not encrypted, my understanding is that there is no need to constrain how it is turned into records.
>
> Note that a constrained server has to handle a full ClientHello - the client won't know the limit at the server.
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