Re: [TLS] new error alerts?

[Dave Garrett <[e-mail]>]

On Friday, July 24, 2015 01:50:31 am Andrei Popov wrote:
> > I'm proposing renaming "insufficient_security" to "unsupported_cipher_suites", which is explicitly what it's been for since TLS 1.0.
> 
> Not quite. Insufficient_security alert is defined as follows:
> " Returned instead of handshake_failure when a negotiation has
>    failed specifically because the server requires ciphers more
>    secure than those supported by the client.  This message is always
>    fatal."
> 
> This is a very narrow and specific definition. The server says "I know all the cipher suites the client advertises, and consider them too weak". By contrast, unsupported_cipher_suites means something like "I don't have a cipher suite in common with the client". The latter can happen when the client's cipher suites are more secure than the server's.

Then if we wish to keep this as narrow as written, we can just have a separate one for unsupported with no judgment on strength:

insufficient_security(71),  // unchanged
unsupported_cipher_suites(72),  // new
unsupported_groups(73),  // new
client_authentication_failure(74),  // new

e.g. RC4 gets insufficient_security & Camellia gets unsupported_cipher_suites

Sounds good to me, if we prefer this.


Dave