Re: [TLS] CH padding extension

[David Benjamin <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 2:01 PM Christopher Wood <
[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 12, 2018 at 10:55 AM Kyle Nekritz <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> > Since the Certificate message is sent in an encrypted record, the normal
> record padding mechanism (section 5.4) can be used, rather than sending the
> padding as actual handshake data.
>
> Of course, and that requires padding on the fly and some way for the
> sender to know what is the correct amount of padding per Certificate.
> Plumbing up that API seems non-trivial. In comparison, one could
> imagine pre-padding wire-encoded Certificate messages a priori using
> the extension. So I still think restricting padding to CH is a bit
> extreme.
>

Using the padding extension isn't going to mesh well with the compressed
certificates draft. (Compression is perfectly compatible with hiding the
length. If all your certificates compress well---they probably do---you can
pad based on the distribution of compressed lengths you're trying to mask.
Of course, this will leak whether compression happened, but that's not the
information that's interesting to hide.)

Record-level padding is indeed kind of annoying to plumb properly though.
I've always thought the excitement for padding at that layer was somewhat
misplaced. I could imagine allowing handshake messages to be punctuated by
no-op padding messages, but then it's just one layer to route through to
get to the record layer here. I think it's more at higher up the stack
where record-level padding really becomes impractical.

David