Re: [TLS] OpenPGP and TLS cert_type code point reuse

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <[e-mail]>]

On 09/30/2010 05:18 PM, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> At 9:11 AM -0400 9/30/10, Sean Turner wrote:
>> draft-mavrogiannopoulos-rfc5081bis reuses the Certificate Type value assigned in RFC 5081 (it's 1).  The extension defined in draft-mavrogiannopoulos-rfc5081bis is not backwards compatible with RFC 5081.  If there were many implementations, then I'd be concerned about reusing the value.  The authors (and I) don't think there are any implementations other than GnuTLS, but I'd like to know if anybody knows of TLS implementations that support RFC 5081.
> Given that there is a known implementation of 5081, and given that GnuTLS is reasonably well-deployed, why doesn't draft-mavrogiannopoulos-rfc5081bis simply use a new certificate type number? So far, only 2 out of >200 have been allocated, so there is no shortage.

The problem is not strictly on the reusal of the extension but on the
reusal of the OpenPGP CertificateType, but the idea is the same. The
problem is that this reuse was made quite long ago in gnutls (when
draft-mavrogiannopoulos-rfc5081bis-01 appeared), thus having all gnutls
releases follow that approach since then.

The reason we don't change that now is that will make the draft
incompatible with gnutls openpgp support, which is supposed to describe
(this is an informational RFC and not standards track). Hence if there
are not any other implementations following RFC5081 this will have
no side effects.

regards,
Nikos