[TLS] Question about Large Record Sizes draft and the TLS design

[Jan-Frederik Rieckers <[e-mail]>]

Hi to all,

during the presentation of the Large Record Sizes draft at the tls 
session yesterday, I wondered why the length restriction is in TLS in 
the first place.

I have gone back to the TLS1.0 RFC, as well as SSLv3, TLS1.3 and TLS1.2 
and have found the restriction in all of them, but not a rationale why 
the length is artificially shortened, when the length is encoded as uint16.

Does someone know what the rationale behind it is?
One educated guess we came up with was that the limit was put there to 
ensure that implementations can make sure to not use too much memory, 
and using 2^14 was deemed a good compromise between memory usage and 
message length, but in my short research I haven't found any evidence 
that would confirm that guess.


Cheers,
Janfred

-- 
Herr Jan-Frederik Rieckers
Security, Trust & Identity Services

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