[NNTP] Last Call: <draft-elie-nntp-tls-recommendations-01.txt> (Use of Transport Layer Security (TLS) in the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)) to Proposed Standard

[Sabahattin Gucukoglu]

On 28 Nov 2016, at 21:44, Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> wrote:
> As strict TLS over a dedicated port is the current TLS best practice to use, what should we do for transit servers?  We currently have no NNSP/TLS port.  Do you believe we should ask to register a new port NNSP/TLS?
> Otherwise, what should we recommend?  (My fear is that adoption and use of that new port by news servers will be slow, or even will never be happening...)

Not for me to argue with the wisdom of the crowd, I'm sure, but I've never liked the idea of going back to TLS "wrapper" ports; it just wastes precious IANA resources for absolutely no reason whatsoever and, as you just highlighted, is in any event unlikely to make a meaningful impact in practice.

Maybe you could compromise; describe the use of the secure port, give it a name, but then only register that port when implementers go looking for it.  Downside is that the RFC cannot specify a fixed port number.