Re: [TLS] Last Call: draft-hoffman-tls-additional-random-ext

[Martin Rex <[e-mail]>]

Paul Hoffman wrote:
> 
> At 12:05 AM +0200 4/22/10, Martin Rex wrote:
> >The IESG wrote:
> >>
> >> The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider
> >> the following document:
> >>
> >> - 'Additional Random Extension to TLS '
> >>    <draft-hoffman-tls-additional-random-ext-01.txt> as a Proposed Standard
> >
> >
> >I'm somewhat confused to see a Last Call for this proposal.
> >
> >We had a discussion on this document on the TLS WG mailing list and
> >determined that this proposal is completely unable to achieve
> >the stated goal.  This extension is completely bogus.
> 
> You came to that conclusion; many other folks disagreed. You stated
> that you thought it was not useful in some environments, namely with
> RSA authentication where the client has a broken PRNG. If that is the
> only environment you care about, then this extension is not useful.
> TLS is used in many other environments, of course.

Well, I'm sorry.

There was not a single technical argument against the determination
that this extension is completely bogus in the discussion.


It is simply impossible to make up for the lack of entropy
(= secret randomness) with the addition of any amount of
published randomness, such as this extension suggests.


Get a cryptographer to make a convincing case for the value of
this extension in TLS, otherwise this extension should *NOT* be
standardized by the IETF.


-Martin