ietf-nntp TLS cipher renegotation to NULL cipher
Ken Murchison
ken at oceana.com
Mon Feb 10 12:41:07 PST 2003
"Jeffrey M. Vinocur" wrote:
>
> There is a new issue raised below that I'd like people to discuss.
>
> It is of particular interest to people who want TLS protection only on the
> authentication step, and to client authors who may be more in touch with
> their users than I am.
The text below is taken from an IMAP mailing list thread regarding TLS
renegotiation and/or DSS in NNTP. FWIW, I agree with Chris (as I and
several others have from the beginning).
Chris Newman wrote:
FWIW, my opinion is this is likely another case of computer engineers
trying to optimize something that doesn't need to be optimized (a sin I
have been guilty of many times).
And I'm saying that as someone who went to the trouble of writing a spec
and implementing a prototype SASL mechanism for this purpose (plaintext
password encrypted only during the authentication phase). I now think
that
work was largely a waste of time (although I had fun doing it and
learned a
lot).
The cost of symmetric ciphers is small to negligable on modern hardware,
particularly a wimpy cipher like RC4 which is the most common in
SSL/TLS.
Rather than making TLS implementations more complicated (and less
secure)
to support mid-stream down-negotiation, or introducing another SASL
mechanism to do this, why not just optimize the RC4 code? That will
benefit _all_ protocols using TLS and reduce the complexity of the
Internet
suite of protocols.
Encrypting data that doesn't need to be encrypted is good for overall
security of the system.
- Chris
--
Kenneth Murchison Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer 21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26 Orchard Park, NY 14127
--PGP Public Key-- http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp
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