Re: [TLS] draft-green-tls-static-dh-in-tls13-01

[Eric Mill <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Jul 7, 2017 at 4:04 PM, Russ Housley <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> The enterprise wants forward secrecy on the public Internet. Terminating
> the TLS session at the load balancer preserves forward secrecy on the
> public Internet.
>


> In your response, you ignored a fairly significant point in my previous
> post.
>
>         In some industries, there are regulatory requirements that cannot
> be
>         met without access to the plaintext.  Without some authorized
> access
>         mechanism, the enterprise will be forced to use plaintext within
> the
>         datacenter.  That seems like a worse alternative to me.
>
> From my perspective, draft-green-tls-static-dh-in-tls13 is not advocating
> outdated crypto, like RC4 or MD5.  Instead, it is using exactly the same
> crypto algorithms and key sizes as draft-ietf-tls-tls13.  Again, this seems
> like a much better way forward than plaintext throughout the datacenter.
>

Your response is also failing to address a very important point, by
presenting the choice as either static-key TLS or plaintext. That's clearly
not the case -- you can maintain traffic visibility at endpoints within
your data center, by forcing traffic through terminating trusted proxies
which log the same network traffic data you would get from passive
monitoring. You can do that with forward secret TLS today.

I'm sure it's not as easy to change your designs to incorporate proxies as
it is to just rely on the network monitoring infrastructure you already
have in place, but that's not a good enough reason to insist that the TLS
WG standardize an RFC which can plainly be used for wiretapping.

It's also passing up an opportunity to gain the benefits of forward secret
connections within your data center, which should really be a best practice
and requirement for any organization managing data that merits strict
regulatory oversight.

This comes across as asking the IETF to contort itself around its own
stated goals so that the enterprise doesn't have to do any heavy lifting to
keep up with security trends. As explained so far, this seems like
something the TLS WG should reject.

-- Eric


>
> Russ
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