Re: [TLS] Keeping TLS extension points working

[David Benjamin <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 6:32 PM David Benjamin <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I'm not sure how this process usually works, but I would like to reserve a
> bunch of values in the TLS registries to as part of an idea to keep our
> extension points working. Here's an I-D:
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-davidben-tls-grease-00
>
> (The name GREASE is in honor of AGL's rusted vs. well-oiled joints analogy
> from https://www.imperialviolet.org/2016/05/16/agility.html )
>
> One problem we repeatedly run into is servers failing to implement TLS's
> various extension points correctly. The most obvious being version
> intolerance. When we deployed X25519 in Chrome, we discovered an intolerant
> implementation. (Thankfully it was rare enough to not warrant a fallback or
> revert!)
>

Er, I lost a sentence here, sorry.

I meant that, in addition to version intolerance other extension points
have also gathered rust. The X25519 trouble was an example of named curve
intolerance, not version. (Someone forgot a default in their switch-case.)


> It appears that signature algorithms maybe also be gathering rust. Ciphers
> and extensions seem to have held up, but I would like to ensure they stay
> that way.
>
> The root problem here is these broken servers interoperate fine with
> clients at the time they are deployed. It is only after new values get
> defined do we notice, by which time it is too late.
>
> I would like to fix this by reserving a few values in our registries so
> that clients may advertise random ones and regularly exercise these
> codepaths in servers. If enough of the client base does this, we can turn a
> large class of tomorrow's interop failures into today's interop failures.
> This is important because an bug will not thrive in the ecosystem if it
> does not work against the current deployment.
>
> If you were in Berlin, you may recognize this idea from the version
> negotiation debate. Alas that all happened in the wrong order as I hadn't
> written this up yet. This idea can't be applied to versioning without
> giving up on ClientHello.version, but we can start with the rest of the
> protocol.
>
> David
>
> PS: This is actually my first I-D, so apologies if I've messed it up
> somewhere!
>