Re: [TLS] Session Lifetime

[Martin Rex <[e-mail]>]

Eric Rescorla wrote:
> 
> Seth David Schoen wrote:
> 
> > Eric Rescorla wrote:
> >
> > > The upper limit is just a suggestion anyway.
> > >
> > > I'm unaware of any reason why weeks to months isn't acceptable.

Well, it spoils "Perfect Forward Secrecy" (for TLS cipher suites that
are capable of PFS) if the Server hangs on the the master secrets of
TLS sessions for weeks.

In general I'm very pro "pinning certs", but if there are PKI credentials
involved in a TLS authentication, some may want to perform a re-validation
of those PKI credentials every once in a while, and and in some software
architectures, that validation might be limited to the PKI code of
the certificate path validation that is performed during a full TLS
handshake only.

In some environments, PKI credentials might be lifetime-limited for
reasons other than ensuring the business model of third-party CAs.


>
> > One concern is that resumed sessions work like cookies to identify
> > users, but users may not have convenient ways to control them as
> > they can control cookies.  There has been recent concern about
> > browser functionality that is equivalent to HTTP cookies but not
> > subject to user control like cookies.
> 
> Rather, the same mechanisms that blow away all other browser state
> (e.g., private browsing mode,, clear cookies,etc.) should also blow away
> session state.

Full ack.  But privacy issues associated with the client-side TLS session
cache might be non-obvious to _some_ app folks calling TLS, so sensible
defaults on the session lifetime wouldn't hurt.


> 
> If the client just keeps session state as long as is convenient,
> then the server can extract close-to-optimal performance with no
> additional protocol effort.

Full ack.

While the server may be trying to optimize for CPU overhead,
round-trips & network bandwidth and memory consumption of cached sessions,
a client may have slightly different objectives.  If client certs are
involved, and the access to the client credentials requires an
interactive query to a user, some client may have a higher interest
in long use of cached sessions.


-Martin