Re: [TLS] Thoughts on Version Intolerance

[[e-mail] (Martin Rex)]

Hubert Kario wrote:
> Martin Rex wrote:
>>
>> Forget TLS extensions, forget ClientHello.client_version.
>> Both in fundamentally broken, and led to Web Browsers coming up
>> with the "downgrade dance" that is target&victim of the POODLE attack.
>> 
>> We know fairly reliably what kind of negotiation works just fine:
>> TLS cipher suite codepoints.
> 
> please re-read my mail, they don't:
> 
> 49% (6240) are intolerant to a Client Hello with no extensions but
> big number of ciphers that bring its size to 16388 bytes)
> 91.5% (11539) are intolerant to a Client Hello with no extensions
> but a number of ciphers that bring it well above single record layer limit
> (16.5KiB)

You're seriously confusing things here.

Any ClientHello with > 200 Cipher suite code points indicates fairly insane
Client behaviour, so rejecting it is _perfectly_sane_ server behaviour.

Trying to support theoretical encoding size limits is a stupid idea,
because it leads to endless security problems.  Imposing sane sizes
plus a safety margin is solid implementation advice.

Large stuff that doesn't need to be exchanged in abbreviated handshakes
should *NEVER* be included in ClientHello, because of the performance
penalties this creates (Network bandwidth for TLS handshake,
and TCP slow start).


> 
>>> I'm now also collecting some data and have some preliminary
>>> suspicion on affected devices. My numbers roughly match yours that we
>>> are in the more or less 3% area of 1.3 intolerance.
>> 
>> The TLSv1.2 version intolerance is already a huge problem,
>> and I'm not seeing it go away.  Acutally Microsoft created an
>> awfully large installed base of TLSv1.2-intolerant servers
>> (the entire installed base of Win7 through Win8.1 aka 2008R2, 2012, 2012R2).

Please recheck with a vanilla (aka extension-free) ClientHello that
has ClientHello.client_version = (3,3), to recognize all TLSv1.2-intolerant
implementations in your counts.


>> 
>> I would really like to see the TLS WG improving the situation
>> rather than keep sitting on its hands.  The problem has been well-known
>> since 2005.  And the "downgrade dance" was a predictably lame approach
>> to deal with the situation, because it completely subverts/evades the
>> cryptographic protection of the TLS handshake.
> 
> it's not IETF's fault that the implementers add unspecified by IETF
> restrictions and limitations to parsers of Client Hello messages or that
> they can't handle handshake messages split over multiple record layer
> messages, despite the standard being very explicit in that they MUST
> support this.

Nope, not really.  Limiting PDU sizes to reasonably sane sizes is
perfectly valid behaviour.  X.509v3 certificates can theoretically include
CAT MPEGs and amount to megabytes.  A TLS implementation that limits
the certificate chain (i.e. the TLS Certificate Handshake message) to
a reasonably sane size with safety margin, say 32 KBytes in total,
is acting totally reasonable.  Anyone who creates an insane PKI deserves
to loose, and deserves to loose quite badly.


-Martin