[TLS] Lessons learned from TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 deprecation

[John Mattsson <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

Hopefully, we have learned some lessons from the TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 deprecation. TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 are (to cite Martin Thomson) broken in a myriad subtle ways and should according to me optimally have been deprecated years ago.

3GPP mandated support of TLS 1.2 in Rel-13 (2015) but could at that time not forbid use of TLS 1.1 as that would potentially break interoperability with some Rel-12 nodes (that had TLS 1.2 as should support). The lesson 3GPP learned from this was the need to as early as possible mandate support of new protocol versions. With TLS 1.3, 3GPP took action early and TLS 1.3 support was mandated for network nodes in Rel-15 (2018) and for mobile phones in Rel-16 (2019).

At some point in time we will want to deprecate TLS 1.2. To enable that, TLS 1.3 support should be mandated or encouraged as much as possible. I would like to avoid a situation where we want to deprecate TLS 1.2 but realize that it cannot be done because some implementations only support TLS 1.2. How can IETF enable smoother and faster deprecations in the future? The browser industry has a decent track record of algorithm deprecation and I hope to soon see the following warning in my browser:

“TLS 1.2 is obsolete. Enable TLS 1.3 or later.”

Other industries have less stellar track records of algorithm deprecation.

How can IETF be more pro-active regarding deprecations in the future? In the best of words, nobody should be surprised when IETF deprecates a protocol version or algorithm. NIST and similar organizations in other countries have the practice to long time in advance publish deadlines for security levels, algorithms, and protocol versions. Can the IETF do something similar, not just for TLS but in general? For TLS, there are several things to deprecate, in addition to MD5 and SHA-1, also PKCS1-v1_5, RSA-2048, 224-bit ECC, ffdhe2048, and non-recommended cipher suites (Static RSA, CBC, DH, NULL, etc.) should be deprecated in the future.

Cheers,
John