Re: [TLS] Proposed text for removing renegotiation

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On 19 June 2014 03:26, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <[e-mail]> wrote:
> My counter-proposal would be:
> 1. Removing the Note "If a rehandshake occurs while data is flowing on a
> connection, the communicating parties may continue to send data using
> the old CipherSpec."
>
> 2. Adding the text: "During the handshake process implementations SHALL
> NOT allow application protocol data exchange. Implementations SHALL
> terminate the session if application protocol data is received." (in
> DTLS that data may arrive due to network errors so they should be
> quietly discarded.
>
> 3. Adding the text "Since the authentication credentials may change
> during a renegotiation the upper layers must be notified of either the
> new negotiation process or any identity change."
>
> That would make renegotiation a strictly inband process, and
> applications would be able to distinguish traffic before and after a new
> negotiation.

That sounds strictly worse than what we have today.

Points 1&2 render the connection unusable, something that many
applications can't have.  In many respects - other than TCP congestion
window warmup perhaps - this is equivalent to Brian's proposal to
remove renegotiation and replace it with nothing, forcing people to
make new connections.

And the main point, which is that it's not the lack of a notification
API for renegotiation that causes the issue, it's the fact that it can
happen at all.