Re: [TLS] draft-davidben-tls-grease-01

[Hubert Kario <[e-mail]>]

On Monday, 5 September 2016 14:48:55 CEST David Benjamin wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 5, 2016 at 7:07 AM Hubert Kario <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > On Friday, 2 September 2016 18:53:45 CEST David Benjamin wrote:
> > > I've finally gotten to uploading
> > > https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-davidben-tls-grease-01 which hopefully
> > > resolves the procedural issues (thanks again!). I've also revised the

> >    Clients MUST reject GREASE values when negotiated by the server.
> >    When processing a ServerHello containing a GREASE value in the
> >    ServerHello.cipher_suite or ServerHello.extensions fields, the client
> >    MUST fail the connection.  When processing an ECParameters structure
> >    with a GREASE value in the ECParameter.namedcurve field, the client
> >    MUST fail the connection.
> >    
> >    Note that this requires no special processing on the client.  Clients
> >    are already required to reject unknown values selected by the server.
> > 
> > Don't the other RFCs just say that clients should reject values not
> > advertised
> > by client? Since GREASE values are advertised by clients, I don't think
> > the
> > "no special processing" applies. As such, handling how connections in
> > which
> > server selects GREASE values should be specified precisely.
> > (I haven't checked the RFCs for that so I may be mistaken, but still is a
> > bit
> > dicey to say that programmers don't need to check error handling in their
> > code...)
> 
> Right. That's why this one says "no special processing" rather than
> "restatements or corollaries of existing [client] requirements" as in the
> server section. In the implementation I've tossed together, this never
> makes it into the list of values the client believes it has advertised. The
> serialization code just adds some u16s without remembering them anywhere.
> As a result, all the existing logic works just fine.

On the other hand, the implementation I work on keeps the sent Client Hello on 
hand and checks the server response against the exact values it sent.

So for it, server selecting GREASE value would be fine, it would fail at key 
exchange processing time.

Keeping the Client Hello in case server asks for certificate verification is 
not entirely unheard of either.

So I think it's best to keep the specification implementation agnostic, 
without any assumptions about how the code is written, and describe just the 
externally visible behaviour. But describe it fully.
-- 
Regards,
Hubert Kario
Senior Quality Engineer, QE BaseOS Security team
Web: www.cz.redhat.com
Red Hat Czech s.r.o., Purkyňova 99/71, 612 45, Brno, Czech Republic