On Fri, Oct 09, 2015 at 02:23:30PM +0200, Eric Rescorla wrote: > Hi folks, > > Please take a look at the following PR which documents a suggestion > made by Karthik Bhargavan about how to prevent protection against > downgrade against downgrade from TLS 1.3 to TLS 1.2 and below. > > https://github.com/tlswg/tls13-spec/pull/284 > > The idea is that if a TLS 1.3 server receives a TLS 1.2 or below > ClientHello, it sets the top N bits of the ServerRandom to be a > specific fixed value. TLS 1.3 clients which receive a TLS 1.2 or below > ServerHello check for this value and abort if they receive it. This > allows for detection of downgrade attacks over and above the Finished > handshake as long as ephemeral cipher suites are used (because the > signature on the ServerKeyExchange covers the random values). No > protection is provided for static RSA cipher suites, but this still > has some value if you have an attack which only affects (EC)DHE.
I think this is "too clever" (a "hack" not a design) and offers incomplete protection (does nothing to protect RSA key transport). So I do not support adoption of this proposal. If new attacks against TLS 1.0--1.2 emerge that enable MITM via version downgrade combined with use of weaker algorithms, then we'll just have to prohibit those weaker algorithms in TLS 1.3 servers (and possibly also clients). -- Viktor. _______________________________________________ TLS mailing list TLS@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tls