Re: [TLS] SNI and Resumption/0-RTT

[[e-mail] (Martin Rex)]

Kyle Nekritz wrote:
>
> I do think this should be allowed if the client is satisfied with the
> previous identities presented. We currently allow resumption across
> domains supported by our wildcard certificate (I believe this is fairly
> common practice), and our clients take advantage of this to improve their
> resumption rate. In regards to the referenced paper, I don't think this
> is any more dangerous than the wildcard certificate itself as a full
> handshake would succeed anyway. I don't think it's entirely necessary
> for the server to opt-in to this either, if the server wants it can
> simply reject the resumption attempt.

I think it is a bad idea to look at this purely from the perspective
of whether this represents an obvious attack vector.

And there are two entirely *independent* decisions involved.

  (1) whether the TLS client proposes resumption for a session
      (i.e. client-side cache management)

  (2) whether the TLS server agrees to a proposed resumption
      or whether it performs a full handshake instead

And there are _different_ security trade-offs in these two distinct
decisions.

As I previously described my position, I'm perfectly OK with a server
performing a resumption if the full handshake would cause the server
to send/present the very same TLS server certificate as in the full
handshake that created the session that is proposed for resumption
... and that is actually the behaviour which I implemented, and
what comes out naturally if you implement TLS extension SNI support
_outside_ of the TLS stack on the server side.

However, I believe that the server agreeing to resumption with a
different SNI hostname is a use case, that with a sensible
generic TLS client, should never actually occur in practice.
Except for bugs or design flaws in the client-side session cache management
maybe.

The client does _not_ know which TLS server certificates the server has
available, and what criteria it will apply for selecting one or the other.
The existence of a wildcard certificate does not unconditionally preclude
existence of host-specific certificates for specific services that are
technically covered by the wildcard.  I really dislike seemingly
non-deterministic behaviour, and therefore try to avoid it as much
as possible in whatever I implement.

The decision to accept a particular server certificate for one specific
hostname/target does not (should not) necessarily apply to *each* other
possible servername covered/conveyed by that server certificate.

Special-casing stuff makes the behaviour also difficult to comprehend
for end-users / consumers (and implementers get it wrong more easily).
What if the server certificate is "manually" confirmed by the end-user
(for whatever reason:  it's self-signed/untrusted or from DANE rather
that PKIX) should that "acceptance" still/also transcend to all other
hostnames (why or why not)?

My client-side TLS session cache management (which I implemented above
the TLS stack), uses the target hostname as one of the session cache
lookup parameters, and I don't think it would be sensible to propose
arbitrary sessions for resumption.

The performance overhead for a full handshake per hostname is completely
negligible (and if the server operator cares, he could simply avoid
spreading content over distinct server hostnames).

What I found painful instead, is the server-side behaviour implemented
by Microsoft IIS / SChannel in the past, because when configured for
optional client certificates, the server exhibits Alzheimer towards
certificate-less clients (or at least it did so in the past),
because it would force each client without client cert through
a full renegotiation handshake after resumption for each new connection,
failing to memorize that the resumed session was created by renegotiation
where the server did ask for a client cert and the client did turn down
that request.


-Martin