Re: [Uta] Robert Wilton's Discuss on draft-ietf-uta-rfc7525bis-09: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2022, at 06:01, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>> Shouldn’t this be "Implementations MUST support TLS 1.2 {{!RFC5246}} or a later version"?  Otherwise, protocols like QUIC would presumably not be compliant with this BCP if they only support TLS 1.3?  Or alternatively, this could probably be stated as "Implementations MAY support TLS 1.2 {{!RFC5246}}".
>
> The implementations we've always had in mind for this document are 
> TLS/DTLS implementations, not implementations of protocols that re-use 
> TLS/DTLS in whole or in part (e.g. QUIC re-uses the handshake protocol 
> but not the record layer). However, that's not crystal clear in the 
> document because we only recently started mentioning QUIC. I'll talk 
> with my co-authors about this when we next have a chance to meet 
> regarding all the recent feedback.

I think that you are right to be cautious here.  What you want to have happen is interoperability.  If you say 1.2 or later, then there is a risk of some implementations doing 1.2 only and some doing 1.3 only, then you lose the ability to communicate.

I think that you might benefit from putting QUIC out of scope, except to note that some of the advice is applicable to QUIC insofar as it uses the TLS (1.3) handshake.