Re: [TLS] draft-rescorla-tls13-new-flows-01 - Thoughts post-meeting

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, 2014-03-16 at 21:23 -0700, Watson Ladd wrote:
> Dear Mr. StJohns,
> 
> Suppose you work at the Chinese Ministry of Truth, in the department
> of web truthmaking, domain forgetting division.
> Right now, if you want to ensure HTTP content is in conformance with
> the truth you simply scan for the Host header and check against a
> list.
> For HTTPS life could get nasty. But luckily we decided to put SNI
> information on the outside, so you can see if that connection needs to
> go down the memory hole.

I think this is a common misconception. SNI places the hostname in the
clear, but that was already available. It is present in plain in both
the DNS request and the certificate sent by the TLS server. SNI allowed
the server to properly select the correct certificate when
multi-hosting, but didn't really modify the existing privacy level.

What I believe is the actual privacy issue there, are the cleartext
certificates (client and server) in TLS. After that issue is addressed,
only DNS will remain.

regards,
Nikos