Re: [TLS] DH group negotiation extension [was: Re: draft-sheffer-tls-bcp: DH recommendations]

[Watson Ladd <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 9:34 PM, Patrick Pelletier
<[e-mail]> wrote:
> On 11/7/13 1:33 AM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
>
>> The minmalist proposal:
>> -----------------------
>>
>>   * compliant clients advertising a ciphersuite using EDH would include
>>     an extension indicating the smallest and largest EDH group sizes they
>>     are willing to accept.
>
>
> The only thing I would add is that besides minimum and maximum number of
> bits, the client should also indicate a multiple, which the group size must
> be divisible by.  For example, Java only supports DH groups whose size is a
> multiple of 64.  If the client can accept any group size within its
> minimum,maximum range, then it uses 1 as its multiple.  So, examples of this
> triple might be:
>
> 1024,2048,64
> 1280,4096,8
> 1024,8192,1
>
>
>> All of the observations above make me think that the minimalist proposal
>> seems to be the least likely to cause controversy and the simplest to
>> patch into existing implementations quickly and safely.
Fuck no.
Why don't we just use an elliptic curve? Failing that, why not define one group?
Having servers and clients suggest groups to each other is a great
denial of service attack
as factoring p-1 might take a while.  What does EDH group negotiation solve?
Sincerely,
Watson
>
>
> +1.  It just fixes the existing mechanism, rather than introducing a new
> mechanism.
>
> However, at the risk of making the minimalist proposal slightly less
> minimal, I'd like to suggest that the extension should also allow the server
> to reply with the DH exponent size:
>
> http://lists.gnutls.org/pipermail/gnutls-help/2012-May/002748.html
>
> --Patrick
>
>
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