Re: [TLS] Next protocol negotiation

[Adam Langley <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 6:46 AM, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos
<[e-mail]> wrote:
> I was wondering, why not do it the other way round. I mean why not
> upgrade to TLS from
> websockets using the rfc2817 method (Upgrading to TLS Within
> HTTP/1.1), or similar. Wouldn't
> that solve the need for a new TLS extension?

For WebSockets, the answer seems pretty clear: one should use HTTPS
URLs. In that case, the protocol to use is communicated before hand.
The WebSockets protocol is designed to look like an HTTP Upgrade to
HTTP servers[1].

My email might not have been too clear, but the problem that we have
is that we wish to negotiate SPDY[2] (not WebSockets). There are also
other protocols that want to use TLS over port 443 (Tor is one that
I'm most familiar with).

Using HTTP Upgrade is a possibility for this, as discussed:

"We could have wrapped the first request in an HTTP presentation.
Base64 encoding and the HTTP headers increase the size of the request.
Later disambiguation also makes the server side code less modular. Lastly,
it simply strikes one as the wrong thing to do; admiting defeat and
accepting an accumulation of protocol detritus."


AGL

[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hixie-thewebsocketprotocol-68
[2] http://www.chromium.org/spdy