Re: [TLS] PR#1091: Changes to provide middlebox robustness

[Hubert Kario <[e-mail]>]

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 18:17:33 CET Eric Rescorla wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 7:39 AM, Hubert Kario <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > In general +1, I like to see TLS 1.3 deployed ASAP and making the spurious
> > failures as rare as possible is a good way to make that happen.
> > 
> > that being said, I have few comments:
> > 
> > On Monday, 6 November 2017 19:19:01 CET Eric Rescorla wrote:
> > > https://github.com/tlswg/tls13-spec/pull/1091
> > > 
> > > As I mentioned a while back, we've been seeing evidence of middlebox
> > > intolerance. I just posted PR 1091, which is based on a bunch of work
> > > by the BoringSSL team and an original suggestion by Kyle Nekritz that
> > > should significantly decrease the rate of these errors.
> > > 
> > > The general idea here is to make TLS 1.3 look more like TLS 1.2
> > > resumption. The major changes are:
> > > 
> > > - Move version negotiation entirely into "supported_versions", and hence
> > > 
> > >   ServerHello.version == 0x0303 (TLS 1.2)
> > > 
> > > - Restore the missing session_id and compression fields in ServerHello
> > 
> > less special cases in parser code - big +1
> > 
> > > - The client sends a fake session_id and the server echoes it
> > > - The server sends ChangeCipherSpec messages after
> > > ServerHello/HelloRetryRequest
> > > 
> > >   (so that the middlebox ignores any "encrypted" data afterwards),
> > >   and the client sends ChangeCipherSpec after ClientHello. Either
> > >   side has to ignore ChangeCipherSpec during the handshake.
> > 
> > That's the part I have a bit of a problem with.
> > If the CCS is necessary to make middleboxes work, and given that
> > lack-of-CCS-
> > intolerance is not something that we can detect reliably (not in a way
> > that
> > can be simulated by an attacker), I think the CCS should be baked in the
> > TLS
> > 1.3 as deep as it was baked into TLS 1.2.
> 
> You don't detect it on an individualized basis. Rather, you measure whether
> it's
> necessary and if/when the necessary level of CCS becomes low enough, you
> just stop sending it ever.
>
> > That is, the standard should make it a mandatory message to send, fully
> > parsed
> > and validated, requiring aborting connection if it is received at any
> > unexpected moment, in duplicate, omitted or malformed. Not only as part of
> > the
> > "compatibility mode".
> 
> Yeah, I'm not enthusiastic about this. It's more stuff in the state machine
> that
> we hope to eventually eliminate. And as David says, it's totally unnecessary
> for QUIC and DTLS
> 
> -Ekr

what I was getting at is that if you want to be compatible with middleboxes, 
you send that CCS always, as you never know what thing will be between you and 
the peer

that means that all the large implementations will be sending them always

that means that new middleboxes will likely end up expecting it either way and 
existing ones won't have much incentive to update/fix

secondly, if we allow for sending CCS at any point, we will end up with the 
same bug as the Alert processing DoS there was in some implementations — one 
that allowed the peer to send unlimited amount of warning alerts

so even if we mark it as optional, I still think we should allow for it to be 
sent at only very specific moments and only once per side

-- 
Regards,
Hubert Kario
Senior Quality Engineer, QE BaseOS Security team
Web: www.cz.redhat.com
Red Hat Czech s.r.o., Purkyňova 115, 612 00  Brno, Czech Republic