Re: [TLS] chairs - please shutdown wiretapping discussion...

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Jul 12, 2017, at 8:24 AM, Kyle Rose <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Much of this conversation seems to conflate wiretapping with collaboration. 2804 has a clear definition of wiretapping:

The problem is that in modern times we can't assume that collaboration is consensual, so the rules in RFC2804 aren't as applicable as they were.   There's no way to have the consensual collaboration use case without enabling the non-consensual use case.   Anything we do that makes it easier to enable the non-consensual use case is a bad idea.   So in my mind RFC 7258 is more applicable here than RFC 2804.

The problem with arguing this on the basis of whether or not there is a non-wiretapping operational use case for this is that there is a legitimate non-wiretapping operational use case here.   As I understand it, the motivation for doing this is to be able to avoid deploying different pieces of DPI hardware differently in data centers.   That's a legitimate motivation.   The problem is that (IMHO) it's not a good enough reason to standardize this.

I would much rather see people who have this operational use case continue to use TLS 1.2 until the custom DPI hardware that they are depending on is sufficiently obsolete that they are going to remove it anyway; at that point they can retool and switch to TLS 1.3 without needing support for static keys.   The advantage of this is that simply using TLS 1.2 signals to the client that the privacy protections of TLS 1.3 are not available, so you get the consensual aspect that Tim was arguing for without having to modify TLS 1.3.