Re: [TLS] Version negotiation, take two

[Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]>]

I like this approach.

On 09/08/2016 06:04 PM, David Benjamin wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I’d like to revisit the question of version negotiation.
>
> EKR wrote up some text for moving version negotiation to an extension:
> https://github.com/tlswg/tls13-spec/pull/632
>
> I would like us to adopt this proposal.
>
> In Berlin, this really got framed as a pragmatic question: the current
> version negotiation has a lot of intolerance and so let’s work around
> that. So, understandably, this seemed like a “let’s adopt a hack
> forever” proposal. I think that framing is wrong. The intolerance
> situation is serious, but I think there’s also a strong argument that
> the current scheme isn’t very good.
>
> The current scheme is very simple. The client advertises a maximum
> version and the server selects based on that. This is the only piece of
> TLS negotiation which works this way. Elsewhere (extensions, cipher
> suites, signature algorithms), one side offers a list and the other side
> picks out of it. I think it’s clear now that strategy is more robust:
> every time we’ve bumped version numbers, we’ve had intolerance problems
> and this time is no exception (see below). By contrast, we regularly
> introduce new cipher suites, extensions, etc., and while we do see the
> occasional failure, they are much rarer and typically within the level
> of breakage that clients can tolerate and deal with by reaching out to
> affected servers. Moreover, lists lend themselves to future-proofing via
> draft-davidben-tls-grease-00 in a way the current scheme does not.
>
> An additional benefit is lists make it much easier to roll out
> prototype/draft versions. Currently, we are using a hack where the
> client offers {3, 4} but also includes a draft version number in an
> extension. This does work, but requires servers process that extension
> in perpetuity or at least until all draft version clients go away.  With
> a list, it’s trivial to offer a draft version by just including it. This
> is the strategy HTTP/2 used (via ALPN) and it worked well.
>
> Despite all of the above, it probably wouldn’t be worth fixing version
> negotiation in 1.3 except for intolerance. Unfortunately, this fourth
> time, it’s the same story as before. A probe of Alexa top million sites
> with BoringSSL’s TLS 1.3 code (the Go version), shows 1.63% of
> TLS-capable hosts reject a TLS 1.3 ClientHello. Note these are top sites
> and traffic is top-heavy, so we can expect much higher usage-weighted
> numbers. Qualys SSL Pulse reports 3.6%:
> https://blog.qualys.com/ssllabs/2016/08/02/tls-version-intolerance-in-ssl-pulse
>
> (Ignore the drop in the graph. We’ve long fixed the ClientHello
> record-layer at {3, 1}. TLS 1.3 only codified existing practice here.)
> If instead we use a TLS 1.3 ClientHello with version TLS 1.2, the
> breakage drops to 0.017%. (Some of this is an NSS signature algorithms
> bug, fixed last year, which we hope to clear by deploying RSA-PSS in
> browsers early. The rest appears to be noise from transient errors which
> crop up in large tests.)
>
> These numbers are *far* too high for clients to accept as damage, which
> means that they (at least browsers) will be forced to do fallback. This
> represents a security risk (cf. POODLE) as well as hides serious interop
> problems. The situation is even worse for non-browser clients, which may
> be unable to deploy at all (Ubuntu 12.04, despite shipping an OpenSSL
> release with TLS 1.2, had to disable it on the client.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openssl/+bug/1256576/comments/4 )
>
> The major arguments against this change seem to be:
>
> 1. It’s inelegant to have two mechanisms.
> 2. We should fix broken servers
>
> The first is true, but as with other changes, EKR’s PR replaces the 1.2
> mechanism with one for 1.3, so we’ll just have one going forward. The
> second would be nice, but as a practical matter, I spend a lot of time
> trying to get those servers fixed and it doesn’t work very well here.
> Better is simply to move to a situation where once those servers upgrade
> they will be correctly behaving forever (instead of just handling 1.3
> correctly and breaking with 1.4). This change does that.
>
> Thanks,
>
> David
>
>
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