[TLS] Some questions about TLS False Start and symmetric ciphers.

[Fabrice Gautier <[e-mail]>]

Hi all,

A couple questions:

1) http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-bmoeller-tls-falsestart-00 is a
few years old. Was there any intent to make this an actual RFC at some
point ?


2) What was the rational for leaving some symmetric ciphers out of the
white list.
In particular, why was 3DES not part of the whitelist, and should RC4
still be on the whitelist ?

My understanding is that the purpose of the whitelist was that an
attacker would not be able downgrade to a trivially brute forceable
cipher (e.g.: NULL, single DES...).
My understanding is that even the best attacks on 3DES and RC4 still
require an attacker to capture many messages, so that capturing a
single encrypted message due to false start does not give you much
advantage.

Or putting it another way: If a cipher is considered not good enough
for False Start, why would it be good enough for TLS without False
Start ?

Thanks

-- Fabrice