Unreliable transport

In the recent discussion of the STLP "strawman", several issues have come
up; here are my thoughts on a few. For what it's worth, I'm in the middle
of implementing SSL 3.0 right now.

- UDP and other unreliable transports: I don't think support for an
unreliable protocol is appropriate for this effort. The current protocols
(SSL & PCT) both provide protection against an opponent blocking traffic;
this can be detected. In SSL 3.0, truncation attacks can be detected. Using
an unreliable underlying transport makes it impossible to provide
protection against this without essentially creating a stream transport on
top of it. I think the standard we create should provide a certain set of
security features which are provided by all implementations of the
standard, and that protection against these "interruption" attacks should
be a part of it.

However, we should think about an unreliable transport standard which would
leverage its cipher negotiation and authentication off of the stream
protocol.

 - Tim Dierks

Tim Dierks  --  timd@consensus.com  --  www.consensus.com
Head of Thing-u-ma-jig Engineering, Consensus Development