Re: [TLS] Certificate compression draft

Hi Martin,

I've measured the effect of compression on a corpus of popular website
certificate chains I had lying around (Alexa Top 100k from a few years ago),
and the effect seems to be about -30% of size at the median and -48% at 95th
percentile (with Brotli, subtract 3-5% for zlib).

I think the most dramatic effect from the compression is observed for the
certificates with a lot of SNI values, which is not uncommon.

  -- Victor.

On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 6:06 PM, Martin Thomson <martin.thomson@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Victor,
>
> Do you have any evidence to suggest that this reduces size in any
> meaningful way?  Certificates tend to include both repetitious values
> (OIDs), and non-repetitious values (keys).
>
> On 7 March 2017 at 09:58, Victor Vasiliev <vasilvv@google.com> wrote:
> > Certificate compression has been discussed on this list briefly before,
> and
> > there was some interest in at least considering a draft for it.  The
> draft
> > now
> > exists (co-authored by Alessandro and myself), and it can be found at:
> >
> > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ghedini-tls-
> certificate-compression/
> >   [ GitHub repo: https://github.com/ghedo/tls-certificate-compression ]
> >
> > The proposed scheme allows a client and a server to negotiate a
> compression
> > algorithm for the server certificate message.  The scheme is purely
> opt-in
> > on
> > both sides.  The current version of the draft defines zlib and Brotli
> > compression, both of which are well-specified formats with an existing
> > deployment experience.
> >
> > There are multiple motivations to compress certificates.  The first one
> is
> > that
> > the smaller they are, the faster they arrive (both due to the transfer
> time
> > and
> > a decreased chance of packet loss).
> >
> > The second, and more interesting one, is that having small certificates
> is
> > important for QUIC in order to achieve 1-RTT handshakes while limiting
> the
> > opportunities for amplification attacks.  Currently, TLS 1.3 over TCP
> > without
> > client auth looks like this:
> >
> >   Round trip 1: client sends SYN, server sends SYN ACK
> >     Here, the server provides its own random value which client will
> >     have to echo in the future.
> >   Round trip 2: client sends ACK, ClientHello, server sends
> > ServerHello...Finished
> >     Here, ACK confirms to server that the client can receive packets and
> is
> > not
> >     just spoofing its source address.  Server can send the entire
> > ServerHello to
> >     Finished flight.
> >
> > In QUIC, we are trying to merge those two rounds into one.  The problem,
> > however, is that the ClientHello is one packet, and
> ServerHello...Finished
> > can
> > span multiple packets, meaning that this could be used as an
> amplification
> > attack vector since the client's address is not yet authenticated at this
> > point.
> > In order to address this, the server has to limit the number of packets
> it
> > sends
> > during the first flight (i.e. ServerHello...Finished flight).  Since
> > certificates make up the majority of data in that flight, making them
> > smaller
> > can push them under the limit and save a round-trip.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >   Victor.
> >
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> >
>