Re: [TLS] Accepting that other SNI name types will never work.

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Mar 3, 2016 at 10:49 AM, Adam Langley <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> The Server Name Indication (SNI) extension in TLS has a provision to
> provide names other than host names[1]. None have even been defined to
> my knowledge, but it's there.
>
> OpenSSL (and possibly others) have had a long-standing bug[2] (fixed
> in master) that means that different types of names will cause an
> error. To be clear: I live in a glass house and am not throwing
> stones; these things happen. However, it means that a huge fraction of
> the TLS deployment will not be able to accept a different name type
> should one ever be defined. (This issue might have been caused by the
> fact that the original[3] spec didn't define the extension in such a
> way that unknown name types could be skipped over.)
>
> Therefore we (i.e. BoringSSL, and thus Google) are proposing to give
> up on this and implement our parser such that the SNI extension is
> only allowed to contain a single host name value. (This is compatible
> with all known clients.) We're assuming that since this is already the
> de-facto reality that there will be little objection. I'm sending this
> mostly to record the fact so that, if someone tries to define a new
> name type in the future, they won't waste their time.
>

Note: it's already the case that it's forbidden to send >1 of any given type
of name. NSS does not presently enforce this rule but will do so soon.

Regardless, I am in favor of this proposal.

-Ekr