Re: [TLS] Working Group Last Call for draft-ietf-tls-tls13-18

[Peter Gutmann <[e-mail]>]

Martin Rex <[e-mail]> writes:

>There is a concept called "provable correctness", 

The problem with provable whatever is that it merely proves that, as far as
the provers can tell, the thing they're dealing with conforms to some abstract
model.  I don't think you can prove much about whatever hiding the ContentType
is supposed to achieve because there's no model for it that says, for example,
"for an attacker with these capabilities, under these conditions, the
following security guarantees are provided".

However, we do have a pile of empirical data showing that pretty much any
seems-like-a-good-idea traffic-hiding really only works until the moment
someone tries to attack it.  The best reference for this is "Peek-a-Boo, I
Still See You: Why Efficient Traffic Analysis Countermeasures Fail" by Dyer et
al.  So at the moment I'd say that if there's some measure that's completely
free (no downsides for anything else) then you may as well apply it because it
can't make things any worse, but not to say "let's do X because it seems like
a good idea" when it has no empirically-demonstrable benefit but lots of
drawbacks.

And it's the "empirically-demonstrable" that's important, Peek-a-Boo is chock
full of examples of things that seemed like a good idea but that don't
actually provide much, if any, benefit, while at the same time introducing all
sorts of downsides.

Peter.