TLS working group minutes, Montreal IETF

Transport Layer Security Working Group
Meeting at the 36th IETF
24 June 1996

Reported by Win Treese (treese@OpenMarket.com)

This meeting was the first one since the working group was chartered.

Win Treese opened the meeting with a few points:

1. The charter has an aggressive schedule, so the working group should aim
to make rapid progress.

2. There was a draft posted (but not in the drafts directory) prior to the
meeting. That draft has been withdrawn. (More details below).

The meeting consisted of several presentations followed by some
discussion. The presentations were:

- Paul Kocher, status of SSL version 3.0 (Internet Draft available)
- Tatu Ylonen, on the transport components of SSH (Internet Draft available)
- Mark Schertler on ISAKMP

The presentation materials were submitted separately from these
minutes.

Discussion centered on several topics:

1. The working group agreed to adopt the SSL version 3.0 draft as the
starting point for further progress.

2. There was some discussion about whether or not the key management in
the TLS work should adopt from IP-SEC, but the group did not reach any
conclusions. A variation of this is how the key management system might
be made modular.

3. Paul Kocher presented several issues that had been listed by a group
that had met a few weeks earlier (notes from that meeting were posted
to the ietf-tls mailing list). Relevant ones are listed below.

4. One of the issues that got some discussion was whether or not the
protocol should include support for pre-encrypted (or pre-MAC'd) data.
The idea is that the could improve performance for a server with static
content. There were several objections to this idea, notably the
argument that this violates layering. Alternatives proposed included
leaving it to the application (e.g., for a web server, by defining an
appropriate MIME type).

5. There was some discussion of including compression in the protocol.
The current SSL draft has a placeholder, but no compression algorithms
are defined. Jeff Schiller pointed out that compression has run into
patent problems, especially when connected with encryption.

6. The group decided to focus on stream protocols like TCP, rather than
design for datagram protocols on UDP as well.

Some of the issues left for continuing discussion include:

1. What hash algorithms are used, and how revisions to the protocol
should be managed if/when hash algorithms are broken.

2. Password authentication in the protocol. (There was a rump session
on this following the working group meeting, to be reported to the
mailing list.) We noted that SSH already incorporates this.

3. Certificate selection.

4. Attribute certificates.

Others should be raised on the mailing list.

The working group mailing list is ietf-tls@w3.org. Subscription
requests to ietf-tls-request@w3.org.