[TLS] Review of draft-asmithee-tls-dnssec-downprot-00

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

Hi Alan and Alan,

Thanks for writing this draft.  Even though the intent here is abundantly
clear and this email risks me being drawn into the toxic mess of the
related discussion, I found this draft to provoke an interesting thought.

Though the current design is for a two octet commitment that narrowly
addresses one particular extension, it seems that - like the must-staple
design - there is an opportunity here.

We have potential downgrade attacks on a range of extensions, not just the
identified one.  For instance, failing to provide the extended master
secret extension represents a fairly significant regression in capabilities
that could be indicative of an attack.  The same for renegotiation info,
SCT, and others.  I thought supported_versions might be a valid use, but
I'm not 100% sure there.  The extension could reference itself though.

A commitment to continue to provide a particular feature - as identified
via its extension - would be a potentially useful capability.

Of course, this would need to squarely address the potential for a service
to take itself out in the way that such commitments tend to.  It also needs
to address the scope of the commitment in more than just time.  This isn't
trivial when you consider that a server can be considered valid for
multiple identities.  The current draft doesn't really do either topic
justice.

Having this indicator expire when you get an authenticated denial of
existence seems odd.  Why not just update the lifetime when the connection
is successful unconditionally?

Finally, I don't see any value in the "if you use that then you must use
this" text in the draft, but that's likely just a consequence of the other
discussion.

Cheers,
Martin