Re: [TLS] FFDHE and SHOULDs on usage

[Hubert Kario <[e-mail]>]

On Saturday 18 April 2015 05:10:52 Martin Rex wrote:
> Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> >> Groups are ordered based on client preference, noting the additional
> >> ordering considerations in Section 6.1.
> > 
> > Also, this rewrite says "ordered based on client preferences" but
> > doesn't indicate which order based on client preferences: most preferred
> > to least preferred or the other way around.  It may be pedantic, but
> > this is exactly the sort of pedantry that RFCs should include.
> 
> Could we just scrap the "based on xxx preference" nonsense entirely?
> 
> The sender of the list sends whatever it sees fit, and the receiver
> of the list has the privilege to pick what ever the receiver believes
> is most appropriate from the receivers point of view.
> 
> I never understood why (a) such a silly suggestion was made for
> the ordering of cipher suites in ClientHello and (b) why any TLS server
> implementaion would care for the client's ordering rather than enforcing
> the server preference.  If the client does not want something, it must
> not offer it.  If the server does not want something, it must not pick it.

If you have a relatively recent desktop CPU you don't care if you're using AES 
or ChaCha20. But if you're on a CPU which doesn't have a hardware acceleration 
for AES and is relatively slow (think mobile ARM), then you really would 
prefer ChaCha20 cipher over AES.

So server should _consider_ client preference. And the clients should have an 
order which is sane.
-- 
Regards,
Hubert Kario
Quality Engineer, QE BaseOS Security team
Web: www.cz.redhat.com
Red Hat Czech s.r.o., Purkyňova 99/71, 612 45, Brno, Czech Republic