I support staying the course, continuing work on the key share prediction draft 
and allocating the code point.

Cheers,

Andrei

From: David Benjamin <david...@chromium.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 10, 2024 2:40 PM
To: <tls@ietf.org> <tls@ietf.org>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [TLS] draft-ietf-tls-key-share-prediction next steps

Hi all,

Now that we're working through the Kyber to ML-KEM transition, TLS 1.3's 
awkwardness around key share prediction is becoming starkly visible. (It is 
difficult for clients to efficiently offer both Kyber and ML-KEM, but a hard 
transition loses PQ coverage for some clients. Kyber was a draft standard, just 
deployed by early adopters, so while not ideal, I think the hard transition is 
not the end of the world. ML-KEM is expected to be durable, so a 
coverage-interrupting transition to FancyNewKEM would be a problem.)

We adopted draft-ietf-tls-key-share-prediction in June to address this. There 
hasn't been a whole lot to do on it since. I've cut a new draft, 
draft-ietf-tls-key-share-prediction-01, with some very minor changes that were 
queued up in GitHub. I'd like to sort out next steps and move forward.

Beyond that, there are a couple of minor issues in the issue tracker. I don't 
believe either of these need to block getting a codepoint.
https://github.com/tlswg/tls-key-share-prediction/issues/4 - unless folks think 
otherwise, I plan to just leave this alone and close this
https://github.com/tlswg/tls-key-share-prediction/issues/7 - unless folks think 
otherwise, I plan to just leave this alone and not require the receiver to check

Finally, there's the question of downgrade protection:
https://github.com/tlswg/tls-key-share-prediction/issues/11

For some background if folks have forgotten, the original key share prediction 
draft included a ton of complexity to accommodate existing server behavior that 
would preferentially pick groups out of key_share even if an otherwise more 
preferred group was in supported_groups. Depending on what the server was 
trying to do there, this could be perfectly fine (if the server believes the 
groups are comparable in security) or a downgrade risk (if the server actually 
believed they were in different security classes---PQ vs classical---but 
implemented a key_share-first selection algorithm anyway). Pre-adoption, my 
original draft took the position that it was ambiguous and we cannot safely 
assume the server knew what it was doing. It designed a scheme to clarify the 
semantics going forward and use codepoints to ratchet in whether the server 
implemented the new semantics.
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-davidben-tls-key-share-prediction-00.html

After WG discussion, I think we broadly concluded the semantics were actually 
already present in RFC 8446, and it was not worth the trouble to second-guess 
the servers here. That led to the much simpler draft, which simply discusses 
why this is OK in security considerations:
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-tls-key-share-prediction-01.html#name-security-considerations

As I wrote that text, I unsurprisingly agree with and am fine with this 
outcome. :-) But there was some chatter about it in the adoption thread (see 
GitHub link), so I filed the issue so we continued to discuss it. I think 
perhaps now is the time to discuss it, if we're going to. Do folks want to 
discuss it? Are there alternate proposals, or should we just stay the course? 
Unless we have an alternate proposal, I propose we just stay the course and go 
with [what I understand the conclusion to be from] the previous WG discussion.

If there are no further significant changes that folks want to make, I would 
like to propose we get a codepoint for this and unblock implementation. The 
earlier this is ready, the more likely that we will be prepared by the time the 
next KEM transition happens.

Thoughts?

David
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