- From: Tom Weinstein <tomw@netscape.com>
- Date: Mon, 02 Dec 1996 16:26:14 -0800
- To: Christopher Allen <ChristopherA@consensus.com>
- CC: Matt Hur <matt.hur@cybersafe.com>, ietf-tls@w3.org
After looking at the suggested changes, I'd categorize them as follows. These entail changes to the protocol: > 1. MAC algorithm > 2. MAC contents > 7. Additional alerts > 9. Additional Record Protocol clients These are just clarifications, or restructuring of the document: > 3. Block padding > 4. Message order standardization > 5. Certificate chain contents > 6. The no_certificate alert > 8. Seperation of Record and Handshake layers At this point, I'd be unhappy with any changes to the protocol, although 7 and 9 don't appear to be very damaging to existing implementations. I think that any changes we make to the protocol must be looked at very closely. If we are actually going to consider protocol changes at this time, or for the future, I'd also suggest a generalization of the block padding format. I'd specify that blocks be padded with random data, and that that all blocks have (possibly zero-length) padding. I'd also relax restriction on maximum padding length. This would make it harder to perform a traffic analysis attack, but still allow implementations to forgo the padding if so desired. -- You should only break rules of style if you can | Tom Weinstein coherently explain what you gain by so doing. | tomw@netscape.com
Received on Monday, 2 December 1996 19:24:56 UTC