Re: [Webpush] Eric Rescorla's Discuss on draft-ietf-webpush-vapid-03: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On 16 August 2017 at 22:55, Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Finally, I think this discussion has ratholed a bit on this particular
> counter-proposal. My point isn't that you should do this particular thing
> but rather that it seems like the WG decided on a bearer-token model without
> giving sufficient consideration to alternatives that have better security
> (of which this is merely one). The fact that I was able to produce two such
> alternatives in a few hours (which I'll concede are not in every way
> superior) and your response was not "yes, we considered those and here is a
> pointer to the WG archives" seems to lend that point some plausibility.

Maybe the specific suggestion was the problem.  We did discuss a
number of alternatives.  The history of this draft actually includes
those options.  Some of them did not have the unfortunate property you
don't like.  We considered client certificates, but rejected them on
operational grounds (you might think that unfortunate, because that
would be superior in many ways to all options discussed on this
thread).

Here are the options as originally presented:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-webpush-vapid-00

       2.1.1.  Application Tokens  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
       2.1.2.  Contact Information Header Field  . . . . . . . . . .   4
       2.1.3.  Request Signing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
       2.1.4.  Token Binding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5

I apologize for my reaction.

> I think I explicitly labelled this argument as flippant, but I also don't
> think it's valueless, especially when put up against "Three large companies
> implemented and are too lazy to change".

That's a strawman.  The implementations I worry about are those in the
very many application servers.  The limited number of push service
operators have demonstrated an ability to ship changes fairly rapidly.