Re: [TLS] Accepting that other SNI name types will never work.

["Blumenthal, Uri - 0553 - MITLL" <[e-mail]>]

Based on your explanation, the best solution architecture would be based
on *attribute* certificates (individual attributes signed independently by
their corresponding Attribute Authorities), rather than the current
“all-crammed-in” certificates.

The downside of the above is that this approach isn’t wide-spread, and
would be computationally more expensive (the need to potentially verify at
least two attributes, possibly more - instead of just dealing with one
signature that covers everything).
-- 
Regards,
Uri Blumenthal





On 3/9/16, 9:05 , "TLS on behalf of Hannes Tschofenig"
<[e-mail] on behalf of [e-mail]> wrote:

>Hi Adam,
>
>as Thomas mentioned in his email we are looking into extending the SNI
>functionality.
>
>Let me explain why we are doing it.
>
>We are focused on Internet of Things deployments and we want to use
>TLS/DTLS there to provide communication security. The use of TLS/DTLS
>would solve some of the problems we see in deployments today where
>either no communication security is used (such as in the BMW Connected
>Drive example) or where custom security solutions are used. We want to
>make it easy for developers to add commonly used security services to
>their applications.
>
>Everything fine so far.
>
>In many deployments the IoT device acts as a client and initiates the
>connection to some cloud-based infrastructure (or to some gateway). In
>other deployments the IoT device needs to act as a server. In fact, in
>many home network/small enterprise deployments this seems to be the
>envisioned model.
>
>Assuming that every IoT device has a domain name is not desired or
>useful. Instead, the CORE working group has developed the so-called
>Resource Directory, which acts as a rendezvous point, and may even have
>more capabilities -- with extensions, like caching of data, while the
>IoT devices sleeps. ("Sleeping devices" consume less energy.)
>
>Now, we had to come up with another story of what information to put
>into certificates or, alternatively, forget the use of certificates.
>
>I know that the timing isn't necessarily in our favor. You guys are
>trying to move the TLS 1.3 spec along and our contribution is still
>subject to (longer) discussion at the CORE working group. I also
>understand that you may not necessarily be super interested in IoT usage
>either.
>
>I still hope that this can be taken into consideration. I saw the
>proposal from Martin about defining another extension. This may be an
>option and maybe the answer is as simple as "don't use certificates for
>such scenarios".
>
>I believe other organizations who are also looking into these types of
>IoT scenarios will sooner or later also figure out that there is a
>problem.
>
>Ciao
>Hannes
>
>
>On 03/03/2016 07:49 PM, Adam Langley wrote:
>> The Server Name Indication (SNI) extension in TLS has a provision to
>> provide names other than host names[1]. None have even been defined to
>> my knowledge, but it's there.
>> 
>> OpenSSL (and possibly others) have had a long-standing bug[2] (fixed
>> in master) that means that different types of names will cause an
>> error. To be clear: I live in a glass house and am not throwing
>> stones; these things happen. However, it means that a huge fraction of
>> the TLS deployment will not be able to accept a different name type
>> should one ever be defined. (This issue might have been caused by the
>> fact that the original[3] spec didn't define the extension in such a
>> way that unknown name types could be skipped over.)
>> 
>> Therefore we (i.e. BoringSSL, and thus Google) are proposing to give
>> up on this and implement our parser such that the SNI extension is
>> only allowed to contain a single host name value. (This is compatible
>> with all known clients.) We're assuming that since this is already the
>> de-facto reality that there will be little objection. I'm sending this
>> mostly to record the fact so that, if someone tries to define a new
>> name type in the future, they won't waste their time.
>> 
>> If the community wishes to indicate a different type of name in the
>> future, a new extension can be defined. This is already effectively
>> the case because we wouldn't fight this level of incompatibility when
>> there's any other option.
>> 
>> (I think the lesson here is that protocols should have a single joint,
>> and that it should be kept well oiled. For TLS, that means that
>> extensions should have minimal extensionality in themselves and that
>> we should generally rely on the main extensions mechanism for these
>> sorts of things.)
>> 
>> [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6066#section-3
>> [2] 
>>https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/OpenSSL_1_0_1-stable/ssl/t1_lib.c
>>#L1066
>> – note that the data pointer is not updated.
>> [3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4366#section-3.1
>> 
>> 
>> Cheers
>> 
>> AGL
>> 
>