Re: [TLS] TLS 1.3 - Support for compression to be removed

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

> On Sep 22, 2015, at 8:35 PM, Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 22/09/15 17:23, Tony Arcieri wrote:
>> But an unsafe feature shouldn't be kept in
>> TLS just because some protocols want to do unsafe things and are too lazy
>> to implement their own compression.
> 
> Compression does have issues clearly, but it's not correct to describe
> people wanting TLS to compress as lazy. They're rather looking for the
> same features that TLS has offered for a couple of decades. So if there
> were a way to help them, that'd be good. And if not, the onus I think
> is on us in this WG to clearly explain why we're removing that feature
> in TLS1.3.
> 
> That doesn't have to be text in the TLS1.3 specification but I would
> guess the question may keep coming up, so documenting the answer in
> some archival form (such as an RFC:-) might be a good plan.

Doesn’t this count?

3.3.  Compression


   In order to help prevent compression-related attacks (summarized in
   Section 2.6 of [RFC7457]), implementations and deployments SHOULD
   disable TLS-level compression (Section 6.2.2 of [RFC5246]), unless
   the application protocol in question has been shown not to be open to
   such attacks.

   Rationale: TLS compression has been subject to security attacks, such
   as the CRIME attack.

(From RFC 7525)

Sure, we could leave compression in the spec, and recommend that HTTP MUST NOT use it while NNTP MAY. 

A protocol for multiple use-cases can be either one size fits all, or else have a bunch of knobs for the different uses. I prefer the one size fits all approach.

More specific to compression: people had been using TLS (and SSL) to encrypt HTTP for over two decades before the CRIME attack. That’s how long it took to realize that it is dangerous for HTTP. Are people that sure that a similar issue doesn’t exist for the much less analyzed NNTP?

Yoav