Re: [Uta] Proposed definition of opportunistic encryption using TLS: draft-hoffman-uta-opportunistic-tls-00.txt

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

On Feb 4, 2014, at 7:02 AM, Alan Johnston <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Help me understand.  You are saying authentication of the server by the client in TLS is not optional.  I suspect you mean that the client must try to authenticate the server.  

No, I mean that the TLS RFC says that the client must authenticate the server unless one of the anonymous ciphersuites is used.

> I guess what I'm saying is that from a non-TLS expert's perspective, it appears that authentication is optional by TLS, at least the way it is used with web browsers.

Yes, exactly.

> I guess this is the problem of trying to define opportunistic for a single protocol, rather than trying to define the term generically and then apply it to a given protocol.  For example, it is possible that TLS can only support opportunistic encryption with PKI authentication, but this doesn't mean that we should change what we mean by opportunistic encryption to fit the particulars of how TLS is designed.
> 
> On the other hand, if the word opportunistic has too much baggage, then maybe we just need to treat it as a generic feature name which mean different things in different contexts.  In this case, we would need a new term for the concept that you describe in the first sentence of your definition, IMO.

The IETF has a long history of trying to come up with new terms when the old ones get too confusing. I'm pretty sure every effort has been a failure.

--Paul Hoffman