Re: [tcpinc] Eric Rescorla's Discuss on draft-ietf-tcpinc-tcpcrypt-09: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 5:36 AM, Kyle Rose <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 24, 2017 at 1:33 PM, Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > Well, there are (at least) two other options:
> >
> > 1. You could simply accept the extra round trip and send nonces in both
> > directions, as you do for the non-resumption handshake. That would be
> > the most straighforward approach, and arguably the best one.
>
> Whether this is acceptable to mandate or not really depends on the
> goals of session resumption. If the goal is simply to save compute
> resources for key exchange, then this seems like a reasonable change
> to make; but if the goal is to drive down time-to-first-byte-delivered
> to no more than a normal TCP connection, then this will negate that
> advantage, significant especially for lengthy paths.
>
> If tcpinc were primarily about confidentiality against active
> attackers, I think I'd come down on the side of safety against bad
> implementations; but, as the primary goal of tcpinc is to prevent
> pervasive passive surveillance, I think the balance tips the other
> way: to favor performance over misuse tolerance.
>

Hmm.... This seems like kind of an odd argument given that the design of
tcpcrypt explicitly eschews the kind of techniques that have been found
to be important to high resumption rates in protocols such as TLS.



> I also agree with David Black that I feel like there's a lot of scope
> creep here: frankly, I'm not comfortable making substantive changes to
> the core protocol without doing another WGLC.
>

I agree that you should do another WGLC if you make this change (or either
change, for that matter.) But I don't think that's a reason not to make
changes.

-Ekr



> 2. As I mentioned in my original note, you could have implementations
> > send a nonce in their sending direction before the first byte of
> ciphertext.
> > This isn't as good because you don't get anti-replay, but I *believe*
> > that it would provide strong defense against keying material reuse,
> > which seems like the most immediate threat.
>
> This may be the best compromise: it provides a measure of misuse
> tolerance within the existing performance constraints.
>
> Kyle
>