Re: [TLS] TLS or HTTP issue? (was: TLS renegotiation issue)

[Nathaniel W Filardo <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Nov 06, 2009 at 11:23:23AM -0600, Nicolas Williams wrote:
> This vulnerability will affect different application protocols
> differently.  It certainly affects HTTP.  I think LDAP may not be
> susceptible, but I'm not sure; I'm even less sure about IMAP.  Others
> have indicated that there definitely exist other applications besides
> HTTP which do suffer from this vulnerability though, and that's the key:
> of course there may be more than one application protocol that is made
> vulnerable by this TLS problem.
> 
> We must fix this problem in TLS itself.  The fix may require changes to
> some applications, depending not so much on the protocol as on the TLS
> API used.
> 
> Nico

Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but as far as I understand (one of) the
attack(s), it relies on an application protocol (e.g. HTTP) request being
'fragmented' across the renegotiation (thus the need for, in HTTP, the
attacker-provided X-Swallow-This: header to absorb the client's GET)...

Is it in general sufficient for the server to initiate the reauthentication
only in response to a complete request?  Alternatively, in the case of HTTP,
is it sufficient to reject requests with client-provided headers (i.e.
anything except the GET/POST/... line) on the outer connection?  That is,
are there any clients which actually depend on being able to fragment
requests like this?

Just curious.  Thanks.
--nwf;