Re: [TLS] ESNIKeys over complex

[Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>]

Hiya,

On 20/11/2018 23:30, Eric Rescorla wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 1:46 PM Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
> 
>>
>> Hiya,
>>
>> I've started to try code up an openssl version of this. [1]
>> (Don't be scared though, it'll likely be taken over by a
>> student in the new year:-)
>>
> 
> Thanks for your comments. Responses below.

Ditto.

> 
>>From doing that I think the ESNIKeys structure is too
>> complicated and could do with a bunch of changes. The ones
>> I'd argue for would be:
>>
>> - use a new RR, not TXT
>>
> 
> This is likely to happen.
> 
> - have values of ESNIKey each only encode a single option
>>   (so no lists at all) since >1 value needs to be supported
>>   at the DNS level anyway
>>    - that'd mean exactly one ciphersuite
>>    - exactly one key share
>>
> 
> I don't agree with this. It is going to lead to a lot of redundancy because
> many
> servers will support >1 cipher suite with the same key share. Moreover, from
> an implementation perspective, supporting >1 RR would be quite a bit more
> work.

Aren't DNS answers RRsets? I may be wrong but I thought DNS
clients have to handle that anyway, and I'd expect use of
RRsets to be a part of figuring out a multi-CDN stpry.

That said, >1 ciphersuite wouldn't be so bad if that were
the only list per RData instance. Or maybe one could get
rid of it entirely via some conditional link the to set
of suites in the CH, not sure. (Or just go fully experimental
and say everyone doing esni for now has to use the same
suite all the time.)

> 
>    - no extensions (make an even newer RR or version-bump:-)
>>
> 
> Again, not a fan of this. It leads to redundancy.

That's reasonable. OTOH, it's equally reasonable to say that
we're dealing with an experimental draft and a future PS
version could use another RRytpe and add extensions if they
end up needed.

> 
> 
> - get rid of not_before/not_after - I don't believe those
>>   are useful given TTLs and they'll just lead to failures
>>
> 
> I'm mostly ambivalent on this, but on balance, I think these are useful,
> as they are not tied to potentially fragile DNS TTLs.

If there were a justification offered for 'em I'd be
ok with it, but TBH, I'm not seeing it. And my main
experience of the similar dates on RRSIGs are that they
just break things and don't help. Put another way, I
don't know what sensible code to write to decide between
not connecting or sending SNI in clear if one of these
dates is out of whack. (I be tempted to just ignore the
time constraints and try send the SNI encrypted instead.)
And having to deploy a cron job equivalent for the DNS
data is an order of magnitude harder than not.

> 
> - get rid of padded_length - just say everyone must
>>   always use the max (260?) -
> 
> 
> I'm not in favor of this. The CH is big enough as it is, and this has a
> pretty big impact on that, especially for QUIC. There are plenty of
> scenarios where the upper  limit is known and << 160.

True, big CH's are a bit naff, but my (perhaps wrong)
assumption was that nobody cared since the F5 bug. It
seems a bit wrong though to have every domain that's
behind the same front have to publish this. I'm also
not sure it'll work well if we ever end up with cases
where domains A and B both use fronts/CDNs x and y and
can't figure out a good value as x prefers 132 and y
prefers 260.

How about rounding up to the nearest power of 2 that's
bigger than 5? (Or some such.) Very long names might
lose some protection, but I'm not sure that's a big
deal and one can likely just register a shorter name
for applications using ESNI.

> 
> 
> that needs to be the same
>>   for all encrypted sni values anyway so depending on
>>   'em all to co-ordinate the same value in DNS seems
>>   fragile
>>
> 
> It only has to be the same for all the ones in the anonymity set, and they
> already need to coordinate on the key.

Saying that every key share in DNS needs to be published
with the same padded_length would be ok actually. (As a
nasty hack, you could even derive the padded_length
from the value of the key_share and fronters could just
keep generating shares until they get one that works:-)

> - I'm not convinced the checksum is useful, but it's not
>>   hard to handle
>> - (Possibly) drop the base64 encoding, make it DNS operator
>>   friendly text (or else binary with a zonefile text format
>>   defined in addition)
>>
> 
> We are likely to drop the base64 encoding.

Ack.

And just to note again - I suspect a bunch of the above would
be better sorted out as ancillary changes once a multi-CDN
proposal is figured out.

Cheers,
S.

> 
> -Ekr
> 
> 
> 
>> [1] https://github.com/sftcd/openssl/tree/master/esnistuff
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