Re: [TLS] RFC8446 backward compatibility question

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

Eric,

What you call "pretty clear" is IMHO quite indirect. And yes, i tried
to find evidence and stumbled exactly on that second example and then was
not 100% sure...

My comments where just trying to provide friendly feedback from
a TLS uneducated reader. Remember that TLS is just recently starting
to proliferate into markets like IoT, so an expectation of knowledge about
6000 years of TLS history may not to be expected for broadest readership
of the RFCs (*). 

Another way to educate what you may consider to be "non-core" readership,
is maybe some form of "TLS operational considerations". Your prior answer
about that TLS server cluster consideration would also nicely fit into
something like that. Maybe something for opsec wg..

Cheers
    Toerless

(*) Not sure about the number. Could have been egyption or chinese history ;-)


On Thu, Aug 05, 2021 at 03:23:42PM -0700, Eric Rescorla wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 5, 2021 at 2:37 PM Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> > Thanks for the explanation.
> >
> > My main concern was just to understand clearly what requirements
> > have to be written into RFC when one wants to ensure that TLS 1.2 needs
> > to be supported as the fallback in a particular solution.
> >
> >  With TLS 1.3 not mandating support for TLS 1.2, in such cases one
> > still needs to write MUST support TLS 1.2
> 
> 
> That's correct.
> 
> when one thought
> > a MUST TLS 1.3 might have sufficed (assuming it included TLS 1.2
> > support). A bit more explanatory text in 8446 might have helped.
> >
> 
> TBH, I think this is pretty clear in the document. We don't generally expect
> that support for version X includes support for version X-1. Moreover, there
> is text in the document which doesn't make much sense if you couldn't
> just have a TLS 1.3 stack:
> 
>  This document defines TLS version 1.3.  While TLS 1.3 is not directly
>   compatible with previous versions, all versions of TLS incorporate a
>   versioning mechanism which allows clients and servers to
>   interoperably negotiate a common version if one is supported by both
>   peers.
> 
> 
> Or
> 
>   TLS 1.2 and prior supported an "Extended Master Secret" [RFC7627
> <https://tools.ietf.org/rfcmarkup?rfc=7627>]
>    extension which digested large parts of the handshake transcript into
>    the master secret.  Because TLS 1.3 always hashes in the transcript
>    up to the server Finished, implementations which support both TLS 1.3
>    and earlier versions SHOULD indicate the use of the Extended Master
>    Secret extension in their APIs whenever TLS 1.3 is used.
> 
> -Ekr
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> > Also, the immediate status change of "obsoleted by 8446" may
> > make readers think that TLS 1.3 can take care of migration
> > from TLS 1.2 all by itself, when indeed it can not unless you
> > still also mandate implementing TLS 1.2. Of course we do not
> > have a better keyword vocabulary. Something like "Sunset by: 8446".
> >
> > Cheers
> >     Toerless
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 05, 2021 at 09:16:37PM +0000, Salz, Rich wrote:
> > > >    I am trying to figure out if every implementation compliant with
> > >     RFC8446 is also necessarily interoperable with an RFC5246 peer, or
> > if this
> > >     is just a likely common, but still completely optional
> > implementation choice.
> > >
> > > It is possible to have a single stack that implements TLS.[123].
> > OpenSSL, among many others does this.  Some have implemented ONLY TLS 1.3;
> > that code tends to be cleaner (in a nerd esthetic sense) than code that
> > implements multiple protocols. Some servers even "hand off" pre-1.3
> > protocols to separate implementations (libraries); FB and Amazon used to do
> > that.
> > >
> > > The wire protocol for TLS 1.3 uses some deliberately-reserved extension
> > fields so that a server which doesn't do 1.3 can fail cleanly, and a server
> > that DOES will work. And also the other way, a 1.3 client can work fine
> > with both a 1.3 server and a 1.[12] server.
> > >
> > > It's easy to rationale 1.3-only for clients. It is harder to rationalize
> > 1.3-only for servers if you are intending those servers to be generally
> > accessible on the public Internet.
> > >
> > >
> >
> > --
> > ---
> > [e-mail]
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > [e-mail]
> > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tls
> >

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