[NNTP] TLS draft question

Ken Murchison ken at oceana.com
Tue Jul 19 13:53:03 PDT 2005


Russ Allbery wrote:

> Currently, the TLS draft says that STARTTLS may fail but the NNTP session
> may continue.  A question has been raised as to whether this is possible
> to do reliably, since if TLS has failed, the connection may be in an
> indeterminate state.

Both the client and server will know if the negotiation failed, so I 
don't think its indeterminate.

> Are there other STARTTLS specifications that allow
> this case?  I don't remember off-hand if the TLS working group review
> addressed this point in particular.

Yes.  I believe that our text follows that of IMAP, POP3 and SMTP in 
that the session may continue even if the TLS negotiation failed.

-- 
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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