Re: [TLS] Deployment ... Re: This working group has failed

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

On 27/11/13 1:51 AM, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 3:28 PM, Peter Gutmann <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> Andy Lutomirski <[e-mail]> writes:
>>
>>> - When in client mode, implementations MUST refuse to connect to a server
>>> unless an explicitly chosen set of trust roots (or other mechanism such as
>>> DANE) authenticates that server (hello, everything).
>> Translated: "TLS implementations MUST refuse to connect to any computer or
>> device that isn't a public web server with a commercial CA-issued
>> certificate".  You may as well mandate that "TLS implementations MUST NOT
>> allow the tide to come in".
> Not at all.  I didn't say "bundled set of trust roots;" I said
> "explicitly chosen".  This would ban, for example:
>
>   - stunnel in client mode with verify = 0 or verify = 1
>   - OpenSSL's SSL_VERIFY_NONE mode
>   - The default behavior of Python's urllib2 module
>
> etc.  If an implementation wanted to offer a scary opt-in way to say
> "make me completely insecure", I have no problem with that.  It's
> unacceptable, though, that the default behavior of a lot of libraries
> is to skip verification.
>
> I personally use TLS with private trust roots -- lots of people do
> this.  The problem is when people use TLS with no trust roots at all.
If by "lots" you mean too many to get them all together for beer night 
-- yes. But the kind of technical know-how is in short supply, and 
caring about this even among those with technical know-how is also thin 
on the ground.

I'm sure there are thousands of people who use TLS with private trust 
roots, as well as thousands of companies. But that's a small portion of 
people and companies, and the rest of us also need stuff that works.

Yoav