Re: [TLS] Encrypting record headers: practical for TLS 1.3 after all?

Henrick Hellström <henrick@streamsec.se> Fri, 27 November 2015 16:22 UTC

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From: Henrick Hellström <henrick@streamsec.se>
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Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 17:21:18 +0100
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Subject: Re: [TLS] Encrypting record headers: practical for TLS 1.3 after all?
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On 2015-11-27 15:35, Bryan A Ford wrote:
> The idea of encrypting TLS record headers has come up before, the most
> important purpose being to hide record lengths and boundaries and make
> fingerprinting and traffic analysis harder.

How, exactly, would this be significantly harder? The adversary will 
still be able to tell when, and how much, TCP/IP data is sent between 
the peers. If there happens to be a revealing TLS record boundary in the 
middle of a TCP/IP packet, it would seem to me there is an 
implementation problem rather than a problem with the abstract protocol.