6 ms·

Why do people hate eTLS so much? What do you care what enterprises do within their own networks? They have their requirements and they’ll have to implement them

• Nextgrid 8y ago
  From what I can see this protocol is compatible with TLS 1.3 clients. It makes clients believe perfect forward secrecy is in effect while in fact it isn’t. The risk isn’t much about internal networks, it’s when this starts leaking onto the open internet. Also the fact they call themselves “eTLS” to use TLS’ reputation when actually it’s a voluntarily degraded version of TLS.
  • kabwj 8y ago
    There’s no way to guarantee forward secrecy to a client. If regular TLS promises that, the committee is lying and they know it.
    • zrm 8y ago
      There are constructions that provide forward secrecy when both the client and server follow them. This is what TLS aims to provide. If the server doesn't faithfully implement the protocol, of course it will not provide the expected security guarantees. But then it isn't the committee who is lying, it's the server by claiming to implement TLS and then not.
      • zaroth 8y ago
        Forward secrecy is mostly a myth anyway when the “ephemeral” keys used to generate the session are kept in memory for weeks, months, or years already (e.g. HAProxy)
        • Dylan16807 8y ago
          Sure, if you want to pretend that an easily-fixed bug makes security a myth.
          • zaroth 8y ago
            It doesn't matter how easy the bug is to fix, if 90 out of 100 sites don't fix it. In this case it's less of a bug than it is a thorn, because rotating the keys requires knowing when they can actually expire, which requires state that the process holding the keys usually doesn't carry. But my point was more along the lines that PFS was never a guaranteed contract with the client, only a possibility offered by certain key exchange protocols, and even then, easy enough to get wrong that most people did.
• tastroder 8y ago
  Why wouldn't they? That group is trying to standardize a protocol that effectively negates a whole lot of progress and even tried to piggy back on the TLS name. Their stated requirements boil down to snake oil and laziness. If companies or groups thereof want to use security measures that aren't on par with the state of the art and intentionally ignore recent learnings, they of course still have that capability but I don't see why they should be given an opportunity to hide that fact behind a known bad standard. That'd only lead others to be forced to use a broken protocol for reasons like compliance.
  • peterwwillis 8y ago
    > Their stated requirements boil down to snake oil and laziness. Without knowing the internal structure of these particular organizations at all, that's quite a bold claim. If a company has a half million employees and their technology supports billions/trillions of dollars of transactions, it's quite likely that "laziness" has nothing to do with upgrading the entirety of the IPS & DLP products they support, to say nothing of solutions on the client or server side. They can't just edit some config and make all their technology magically support a new protocol that is explicitly designed to stymie their efforts.
  • dogma1138 8y ago
    Because companies in some sectors are required by law to inspect all traffic, while TLS 1.3 doesn’t prevent it in principle it makes it unfeasible to do so in practice given the number of sessions created in a large organization. I work for such organization which actually took a fairly reasonable stance and told BOA to piss off when they asked us to join them in petitioning the IETF to make exemptions to PFS in TLS 1.3. Our current stance is that we dissallow it internally until the vendors that provide us with the DPI and web traffic inspection solutions will have full scalable support for TLS 1.3 or until the regulation would change in a way that would no longer require us to capture, store and be able to decrypt all user traffic within the network.
    • stefan_ 8y ago
      This was never about TLS. Only a stupid person would go "right, we have to decrypt traffic, we control the clients, lets break the crypto". Surely your IT department already updates the software on client computers. Time to put on their big boy tech pants and decrypt data where the secrets are, on the clients. Then your industry can stop harassing everyone else for bad crypto.
• natch 8y ago
  Because I'd like to know that my private information (banking information for example) doesn't travel over insecure networks at my bank or other enterprises. You could try to assure me that it doesn't, but I do not trust uninformed assurances.