Re: [TLS] ALPN concerns

For whatever it’s worth — thank you (personally and F5) for being open about it. You may have just saved us a LOT of pain / gnashing of teeth.

Cheers,

On 6 Nov 2013, at 10:00 am, Xiaoyong Wu <X.Wu@F5.com> wrote:

> It is a little bit more calculation than that and related to some historic reasons, aka SSLv2.
> 
> For SSL records, the SSLv3 and TLS ClientHello headers are as follows:
> 
> | 22 | version major | version minor | length high bits | length low bits |
> 
> If this is interpreted as an SSLv2 header, it will be considered as a 3 byte header:
> | v2 header b0 | v2 header b1 | v2 header b2 | message type | 
> 
> The value for Client Hello message type is SSLV2_MT_CLIENTHELLO which is 1.
> When there is an SSLv3/TLS client-hello of length 256 - 511 bytes, this is ambiguous as "message type" is 1 or it is the "length high bits" to be 1.
> 
> Out implementation before the patch was to prefer SSLv2 and thus the issue.
> 
> As I am explaining this in detail, I would say that another work around on this would be making a client hello that exceeds 512 in length.
> 
> -Xiaoyong
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: tls-bounces@ietf.org [mailto:tls-bounces@ietf.org] On Behalf Of Peter
>> Gutmann
>> Sent: Tuesday, November 05, 2013 10:53 PM
>> To: <tls@ietf.org>
>> Subject: Re: [TLS] ALPN concerns
>> 
>> Brian Smith <brian@briansmith.org> writes:
>> 
>>> I am very concerned about the issues that they've run into where many
>>> web servers are failing to handshake when the ClientHello message is
>>> larger than
>>> 255 bytes.
>> 
>> I'm curious as to how something like this could come about, is anyone familiar
>> with the code base for something that does this?  Is there actually code out
>> there that explicitly checks:
>> 
>>  if( sizeof( client_handshake ) > 255 )
>>    return( -1 );
>> 
>> and if so, why?
>> 
>> Peter.
>> _______________________________________________
>> TLS mailing list
>> TLS@ietf.org
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--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/