Re: [TLS] ECH & HPKE versions as an example of too much githubbery

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 4:00 PM Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
> Hiya,
>
> On 27/10/2020 22:28, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> > Stephen,
> >
> > I don't think what you're complaining about can be attributed to
> > GitHub. Tools are just tools, how they're used is what's relevant
> > (i.e., this could just as easily happen over e-mail).
>
> Sorta. I doubt the volume of traffic would've happened via
> email for non-contentious, not-trivial-but-not-earthshaking
> topics.
>
> I "watch" the repos for these drafts, and in just the last
> month, I've seen 401 esni emails, 127 hpke emails and 157
> dns-alt-svc emails. That's too many, is encouraged by the
> tools IMO and has to mean a lot not being discussed on the
> list that ought be.
>
> So I do think the tooling is really part of this. But yes,
> had someone taken on the mega-task of bringing the useful
> bits of those 683 mails per month to the list, it may have
> been that the mismatch would've been avoided.
>

This seems to me like it makes the argument for the tooling. Namely that it
enables low friction participation on details.



> PS: I neglected to say in my earlier mail that hpke-05 has
> an interop bug that we discovered when I was verifying the
> test vectors a few months ago. It's not the right basis to
> pick if we want esni-08 to be used for interop really. But
> more to the point, nor is a moving target.
>

I think this is the key point. ECH is under active development with open
issues. Trying to do interop now is at your own risk.

-Ekr


>
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> >
> >> On 28 Oct 2020, at 7:31 am, Stephen Farrell
> >> <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> Hiya,
> >>
> >> The latest ECH draft from Oct 16 says "ECH uses draft-05 of HPKE
> >> for public key encryption."
> >>
> >> The latest HPKE draft (-06) from Oct 23 has a few minor
> >> incompatible changes (for good but relatively trivial reasons).
> >>
> >> So for interop ECH apparently requires use of an outdated I-D,
> >> despite the one week difference in publishing and a common
> >> co-author.
> >>
> >> It seems a bit mad that all that githubbery results in such a lack
> >> of co-ordination in two closely related specs.
> >>
> >> Anyway, I can manage to handle both HPKE-05 and HPKE-06 but this
> >> seems like yet another case where there is too much githubbery
> >> going on with the result that two closely linked drafts with a
> >> common co-author end up out of whack despite being issued within a
> >> week of one another.
> >>
> >> That and the velocity of discussion and changes on github are a
> >> major disincentive (for me) for implementing ECH. I simply do not
> >> have the cycles to keep up with it as it has been happening these
> >> last months. If that were the goal of the authors and those
> >> endlessly commenting on github (and I do not believe it is), then
> >> they would be close to reaching that goal.
> >>
> >> Can we not please freeze this stuff for at least long enough to get
> >> implementations done and somewhat tested?
> >>
> >> Frankly, I expect my plea here to be more or less ignored just as
> >> my previous entreaties were. I decided to send it anyway on the
> >> basis that the perhaps what seems like an obvious failure of the
> >> current approach (ECH can't interop unless you use an outdated I-D
> >> for HPKE) might show that all this apparent high velocity
> >> discussion on github is not as effetcive as claimed (in at least
> >> this case).
> >>
> >> Thanks, Stephen.
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________ TLS mailing list
> >> [e-mail] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tls
> >
> > -- Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/
> >
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