Re: [TLS] Certificate compression draft

[Rob Stradling <[e-mail]>]

Hi Hannes.

Cached-Info is useful, but it can only "compress" if the client has 
previously seen and cached the server's certificate.

AIUI, the purpose of draft-ghedini-tls-certificate-compression is to 
enable compression even in cases where the client hasn't yet seen the 
server's certificate.

On 07/03/17 08:14, Hannes Tschofenig wrote:
> Hi Victor
>
> why don't you use RFC 7924:
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7924
>
> This provides an even better "compression" ratio.
>
> Ciao
> Hannes
>
>
> On 03/06/2017 11:58 PM, Victor Vasiliev wrote:
>> Certificate compression has been discussed on this list briefly before, and
>> there was some interest in at least considering a draft for it.  The
>> draft now
>> exists (co-authored by Alessandro and myself), and it can be found at:
>>
>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ghedini-tls-certificate-compression/
>>   [ GitHub repo: https://github.com/ghedo/tls-certificate-compression ]
>>
>> The proposed scheme allows a client and a server to negotiate a compression
>> algorithm for the server certificate message.  The scheme is purely
>> opt-in on
>> both sides.  The current version of the draft defines zlib and Brotli
>> compression, both of which are well-specified formats with an existing
>> deployment experience.
>>
>> There are multiple motivations to compress certificates.  The first one
>> is that
>> the smaller they are, the faster they arrive (both due to the transfer
>> time and
>> a decreased chance of packet loss).
>>
>> The second, and more interesting one, is that having small certificates is
>> important for QUIC in order to achieve 1-RTT handshakes while limiting the
>> opportunities for amplification attacks.  Currently, TLS 1.3 over TCP
>> without
>> client auth looks like this:
>>
>>   Round trip 1: client sends SYN, server sends SYN ACK
>>     Here, the server provides its own random value which client will
>>     have to echo in the future.
>>   Round trip 2: client sends ACK, ClientHello, server sends
>> ServerHello...Finished
>>     Here, ACK confirms to server that the client can receive packets and
>> is not
>>     just spoofing its source address.  Server can send the entire
>> ServerHello to
>>     Finished flight.
>>
>> In QUIC, we are trying to merge those two rounds into one.  The problem,
>> however, is that the ClientHello is one packet, and
>> ServerHello...Finished can
>> span multiple packets, meaning that this could be used as an amplification
>> attack vector since the client's address is not yet authenticated at
>> this point.
>> In order to address this, the server has to limit the number of packets
>> it sends
>> during the first flight (i.e. ServerHello...Finished flight).  Since
>> certificates make up the majority of data in that flight, making them
>> smaller
>> can push them under the limit and save a round-trip.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>   Victor.

-- 
Rob Stradling
Senior Research & Development Scientist
COMODO - Creating Trust Online