Re: [tcpinc] Review of draft-bittau-tcpinc-tcpeno-01

[David Mazieres <[e-mail]>]

Watson Ladd <[e-mail]> writes:

> Suppose everyone behaves the way you suggest. How unhappy are they
> with using X or Y? Clearly not very much: they were willing to use it
> if the other side didn't want their preference.

Actually, people have *very* strong opinions about crypto and are
willing to lobby pretty hard for particular algorithms and protocols.
We should ensure such lobbying is directed towards OS vendors *after*
TCP-ENO is standardized, not towards the working group beforehand (where
it will further slow us down undermine TCP-ENO's goal of breaking the
working group deadlock).

> The result of wanting to support every possible combination of
> preferences and admin interface is having dead options linger forever
> as the sysadmins keep copypasta in config files alive forever. I'd
> rather order my crypto from McSorley's.

The fact that we have way too many encryption options floating around
does not mean all ciphersuites can be strictly ordered by security, for
the simple reason that nobody can predict the future.  Cryptanalysis may
alter the relative security of different algorithms at any time.  Or
some NIST scandal might erupt casting doubt on the design methodology of
P-512 compared to the nominally weaker Curve25519.  At such points, OS
vendors need the ability to re-prioritize cipher suites without breaking
backwards compatibility.

David