Re: [TLS] WGLC for draft-ietf-tls-ticketrequests

[Viktor Dukhovni <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Feb 01, 2020 at 08:05:28PM -0800, Watson Ladd wrote:

> > Sorry, no idea what that above means.  And is it simpler than the
> > proposal under discussion (which got some fine-tuning in early
> > feedback)?
> 
> So one proposal in above is we treat 0 tickets as "ensure I have a valid
> ticket, either this one or a new one" and all other numbers are straight
> asks for that many tickets.

This is indeed simpler, but it removes the ability to ask for zero
tickets, which I think was one of the intended use-cases (that's what
the 255 is for).

> The other proposal is N means "ensure I have N valid tickets, including the
> one I used on this connection". I find both cleaner then the 0 and 255 swap.

The problem here is now reuse is implicit, and the only way for a client
to ensure that it gets a fresh ticket, is by asking for 2.

So I now see where you're coming from, and it was worth a try at
simplification, but I don't think it works out.  The reasons for
two sentinels is that in fact are three separate cases.

    1.  Client wants no tickets
    2.  Client wants to try to reuse an existing ticket
    3.  Client wants n > 0 fresh tickets.

I don't see how to handle 1 and 2 cleanly without two sentinels.

-- 
    Viktor.