Re: [TLS] Industry Concerns about TLS 1.3

[Seth David Schoen <[e-mail]>]

BITS Security writes:

> The various suggestions for creating fixed/static Diffie Hellman keys raise interesting possibilities.  We would like to understand these ideas better at a technical level and are initiating research into this potential solution.  We need to understand the potential ramifications and other implementation details.  This solution would have to be implemented in servers, firewalls, load balancers, Internet proxies, and mainframes.  If vendors broadly refuse to support then it is not much a solution but at this point looks like it is worth exploring.  

Bear in mind that, if you do that, anyone who gets a copy of that secret
will be able to retrospectively decrypt all of your organization's
TLS traffic.  However, that's presumably true of any solution that
satisfies the requirement that you describe: there will always be _some_
secret that the organization possesses that, if obtained by an adversary,
would let the adversary retrospectively decrypt traffic.

This configuration might be a bit dangerous because it means that
"servers, firewalls, load balancers, Internet proxies, and mainframes"
would all possess the information needed to decrypt _each other's_
traffic, so someone inside or outside the organization who can steal
that information can then read all of the traffic, even traffic that was
originated by devices they don't know about or have a relationship to.
So organizational unit X can read the traffic of organizational unit Y,
even if X wasn't meant to be in a supervisory or audit relationship
over Y, because the ability to emit decryptable traffic of this kind
also implies the ability to decrypt others' sessions.

It also provides a way that other parties outside of the organization can,
even through passive eavesdropping, recognize the organization's traffic
as associated with that organization -- kind of like a global cookie
inside the TLS handshake.  People could use that to target surveillance
or advertising even if they didn't know or recognize the organization's
IP address ranges.

-- 
Seth Schoen  <[e-mail]>
Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
Electronic Frontier Foundation                  https://www.eff.org/join
815 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA  94109       [phone] x107