Re: [TLS] Security concerns around co-locating TLS and non-secure on same port (WGLC: draft-ietf-tsvwg-iana-ports-08)

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

At 6:46 PM +1300 11/8/10, Peter Gutmann wrote:
>I kinda missed this in the original, but I can't let it go unchallenged:
>
>> My summary of that comment is that STARTTLS for SMTP (RFC 3207) has
>> shown to have some security issues, be complexer to implement than using
>> two ports and thus less popular.
>
>What is this claim based on?

"some security issues": See the long Security Considerations section on RFC 3207.

"be complexer to implement than using two ports": See the state machine described in section 4 and its subsections in RFC 3207. That's much more complex than "OK, let's go".

"thus less popular": Developers would like fewer code paths and more failure states.

> About a year after the initial STARTTLS spec was
>published, I and a few other security geeks did some informal surveys of mail
>being processed at a couple of large sites and found that STARTTLS, after a
>year, was securing more mail than all other email encryption protocols
>combined, and that was a decade ago. 

"more than a bunch of slacker protocols" is a pretty low bar.

>(And going back to Paul Hoffman's
>original post, as the author of the world's most successful email encryption
>RFC I don't think he has anything to apologise about).

We disagree. :-)

>So, what research or figures is the above claim, that STARTTLS is less popular
>than using port 465, based on?

I don't think that is what Magnus said, but he can speak for himself. STARTTLS in POP and IMAP is much less popular than POP and IMAP on a second port for TLS.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium