Re: [TLS] Confirming Consensus: Negotiating upper layer protocols

[Peter Gutmann <[e-mail]>]

Yoav Nir <[e-mail]> writes:
>On Feb 8, 2013, at 12:51 PM, Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
>> Eric Rescorla <ekr at rtfm.com> writes:
>> 
>>> WG members, please provide any comments on whether we should take this work
>>> on by February 21. Additionally, if you wish to propose an alternative, it
>>> would be nice if you could do so soon or at least provide an indication of
>>> interest.
>> 
>> A comment on both of these proposals, to encode their protocols they use an
>> ad-hoc, non-TLS-style encoding whose form is rather unclear:
>> 
>>  Protocols are named by IANA registered, opaque, non-empty byte strings and
>>  the list of protocols is serialized as a concatenation of 8-bit, length
>>  prefixed byte strings.
>> 
>> Does this mean the strings use 8-bit chars, the lengths are 8 bit, both, or
>> neither?  What's wrong with:
>
>I agree that it's not clean, but I took it to mean ...serialized as a
>concatenation of (((8-bit length) prefixed) byte strings)

Yeah, I'd sorta guessed that, but I'd really prefer it if they used the
standard TLS format for things.  At the moment I have to drop use of standard
TLS PDU parsing and switch to an ad-hoc custom-written parser for that one
data blob, I can't see any good reason to use the nonstandard format when
everything else in TLS uses the standard one.

Peter.