Re: [TLS] EXTERNAL: Re: integrity only ciphersuites

[Judson Wilson <[e-mail]>]

FWIW HAM might require public key signing rather than MACs, since MACs are
meaningless without a key.


On Mon, Aug 20, 2018 at 5:02 PM Lyndon Nerenberg <[e-mail]> wrote:

> There is one other -- admittedly esoteric! -- place where a NULL
> cipher would he useful: Amateur Radio applications.
>
> By law, we are forbidden from transmitting encrypted traffic, yet
> there are use cases where integrity protection in the absence of
> data content protection would be of benefit.
>
> A very common case is controlling a remote repeater site.  Using
> data integrity coupled with a client X.509 certificate means I can
> restrict access to the "control" service at the site.  It's fine
> if people see the traffic in flight, since they won't be able to
> authenticate to do a replay or issue their own commands.
>
> This is a distinct improvement over existing control schemes, which
> typically use DTMF touch tone commands that anyone can trivially
> figure out.
>
> As I said, a very niche case.  It has been done before, using IPsec
> AH, but that's extremely heavy weight, and a pain to configure and
> maintain.  It also requires a full-on IP fabric, whereas TLS can
> be implemented directly on top of AX.25 sessions, which represent
> the vast majority of amateur radio packet data links (which I
> acknowledge puts this outside the realm of the Internet, and therefore
> the IETF).
>
> --lyndon  (VE7TFX)
>
> _______________________________________________
> TLS mailing list
> [e-mail]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tls
>