On 11/03/2014 04:16 PM, Leif Johansson wrote:
> We are currently looking at a pretty thin agenda for Honolulu.
> 
> Agenda requests are not like wine: they don't improve with age.

The TLS WG has been struggling with the "fallback dance" done by major
browsers (and possibly some other TLS clients.

The fallback dance represents an attempt to establish a TLS connection
to a peer that fails to implement the version-negotiated handshake
properly the first time.  As such, it's not part of the TLS protocol
itself, but more than one vendor appears to think it's necessary to
improve connectivity.

I wonder if that puts the fallback dance in the purview of UTA.  I am
unaware of any documents that explicitly describe the best practice for
doing such a thing, or if there are different kinds of fallback
approaches that different clients might pursue.

The recent https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-downgrade-scsv-00
describes a mechanism for use by implementations that perform some sort
of fallback, without having any document to reference for fallback best
practices.

Some questions that come up around fallback:

 * should fallback address only choice of TLS versions (min and max), or
should it address other features like extensions and ciphersuites?  some
ciphersuites are not available in some versions, and very old versions
are extension intolerant

 * should fallback happen one level at a time, or are there arguments
for falling back all the way to weakest/most-compatible handshakes?

 * how should stateful TLS clients store state about what versions of
fallback were required to reach any given TLS server?

        --dkg

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