“Authoritative” is not the same as having “a valid TLS certificate for the 
server”. Everyone can get the certificate of a TLS server.

From: TLS <tls-boun...@ietf.org> On Behalf Of 
ietf=40dennis-jackson...@dmarc.ietf.org
Sent: Monday, October 10, 2022 10:15 AM
To: tls@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [TLS] Securely disabling ECH


Hi,

provided the middlebox is authoritative (has a valid TLS certificate for the 
server in question), then Firefox will carry out the described retry behavior. 
Currently all ECH support is disabled behind a pref by default, but you can 
enable it by setting network.dns.echconfig.enabled to true. You will also need 
to enable DNS over HTTPS and browse to a domain with an ECH config.

Best,
Dennis


On 08/10/2022 04:40, Safe Browsing wrote:
Hi Rich,

When I say “authoritative”, I mean it in the true TLS sense, in the way that I 
believe the ECH draft also suggests and requires.

In other words, the middlebox serves a cert to the client that is 
cryptographically valid for the said public name of the client facing server.

How can that be when the client facing server guards its private key properly? 
By re-signing the server certificate on the middlebox with a private key, local 
to the middle box only, for which the corresponding certificate has been 
installed in the trust store of the client, before sending it on to the client. 
Only after the original server certificate has been validated properly on the 
middlebox, of course. Message digests being managed accordingly/appropriately.

That is a very typical setup for most (all?) TLS inspection devices (next gen 
firewalls and such).

Thus this part of ECH, requiring the middlebox to be authoritative for the 
server, is well understood and prolifically exercised in inspected TLS sessions 
today. What is new is that these connections can now fail/close, in the 
“securely disabling ECH” case, and the onus is on the TLS client, not the 
application, to retry the connection without ECH.

I am after such a client, if one exists already.

Thank you.

Sent from my phone


On Oct 7, 2022, at 11:41 AM, Salz, Rich 
<rs...@akamai.com><mailto:rs...@akamai.com> wrote:



  1.  Client <-> Middlebox <-> Client-facing server <-> Backend server


  1.  With "Middlebox" really meaning a middlebox like a firewall or similar.

The middlebox is not allowed to modify traffic between the client and the 
server. Doing so would mean that the packets the client sent are not the ones 
that the server received, and the two message digests would disagree.  (If you 
think about things, it *has* to be this way, otherwise TLS would not be able to 
provide integrity guarantees.)


  1.  From the draft, ECH seems to be designed to still allow successful TLS 
connection establishment if the encrypted_client_hello extension is dropped 
from the ClientHello on a conforming middlebox. Provided that the middlebox is 
authoritative for the client-facing server's public name, as reported/delivered 
by DNS to the client. We can assume that this is the case here.

I do not understand what you mean by this.  The word “authoritative” is used to 
mean that it has a certificate and keypair and can do TLS termination. DNS 
giving the client a particular IP address is not authoritative. It can be 
confusing because DNS terminology uses authoritative to mean that a particular 
entity can prepare data used for DNS responses.  But it is not authoritative in 
the TLS sense.

I think your questions can be answered with those two overall corrections 
above.  If not, please continue the thread.  (And feel free to repost from your 
note since I trimmed for brevity.)




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