Re: [TLS] call for consensus: changes to IANA registry rules for cipher suites

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

> On 30 Mar 2016, at 7:05 PM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On Wed 2016-03-30 11:33:09 -0400, Benjamin Kaduk wrote:
>> I am not sure that we want to be in the business of explicitly marking
>> things as insecure other than our own RFCs, though -- there could be an
>> implication of more review than is actually the case, which is what this
>> proposal is trying to get rid of.
> 
> I think i agree with Ben here: if we have a tri-state:
> approved/not-approved/known-bad, then the people will infer that the
> not-approved ciphersuites are better than the known-bad ones, which
> isn't necessarily the case.
> 
> I think i'd rather see it stay at "approved/not-approved”

+1

Nothing will ever be marked as known-bad unless it’s in widespread use. Nobody’s ever going to write a die-die-die document for some homebrew cipher or even for a national cipher unless something really spectacular happens. I’d rather not have them marked as “neutral”, which implies they are better than RC4’s “known-bad”. 

Besides, what about 3DES? For limited amounts of data it works perfectly fine if you follow all the CBC caveats, but with high-speed high-volume connections, you’ll have to rekey often. And there are faster, better alternatives. Do we mark it as “known-bad”? It’s certainly not broken the way RC4 is. I’d rather we not go there.

Yoav