Re: [TLS] Length of a variable-length vector: Could it be an odd multiple?

[Ilari Liusvaara <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 06:47:12PM +0000, Hodges, Jeff wrote:
> On 1/13/16, 12:53 PM, "Benjamin Kaduk" <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >On 01/13/2016 02:44 PM, Jong-Shian Wu wrote:
> >> I have a question about the even-vs-odd restrictions on the length of
> >> a valid variable-length vector defined in TLS specification after
> >> reading the section 4.3 of RFC 5246 [1] which states that:
> 
> >>"The length of an encoded vector must be an even multiple of the length
> >>of a single element (for example, a 17-byte vector of uint16 would be
> >> illegal)."
> >>
> >
> >It means "whole-number" as opposed to fractional, i.e., there should not
> >be unused "junk bytes" at the end.
> 
> In case it's helpful, here's a suggested re-write of that quoted sentence
> above..
> 
>   The length of an encoded variable-length vector must be an
>   exact multiple of the length of a single element. For example,
>   an encoded 17-byte vector of uint16 would be illegal, and an
>   encoded variable-length vector of four 32 byte elements,
>   having a ceiling of 2^16-1, will be 130 bytes long overall
>   (2 byte length field followed by 128 bytes of data).
> 
> ..assuming I'm correctly understanding variable-length vectors :)

The length of length is inferred from the upper limit:
- 1-255 bytes => 1 Byte
- 256-65535 bytes => 2 Bytes
- 65536-16777215 bytes => 3 bytes
- 16777216-2^32-1 bytes => 4 bytes (not used anywhere)
... And so on.

So yes, 4x32 byte elements in vector with upper limit of 2^16-1 (or
2^16-32 rounded) is 130 bytes total: 2 byte length and 4*32=128 byte
value.

But I think that all lengths above 255 are either specified to be one
byte shy of power of 255 or rounding thereof to integral multiple of
elements (the only exception I offhand remember is session IDs in
TLS 1.0-1.2, which have maximum length of 32).

Then there are vectors with variable length elements. Those can be
created by putting in a vector or discriminant/case in the element
type (the latter can easily lead to interop problems later).


-Ilari