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Re: Last Call: draft-hoffman-tls-additional-random-ext

2010-04-21 17:56:33
Paul Hoffman wrote:

At 12:05 AM +0200 4/22/10, Martin Rex wrote:
The IESG wrote:

The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider
the following document:

- 'Additional Random Extension to TLS '
   <draft-hoffman-tls-additional-random-ext-01.txt> as a Proposed Standard


I'm somewhat confused to see a Last Call for this proposal.

We had a discussion on this document on the TLS WG mailing list and
determined that this proposal is completely unable to achieve
the stated goal.  This extension is completely bogus.

You came to that conclusion; many other folks disagreed. You stated
that you thought it was not useful in some environments, namely with
RSA authentication where the client has a broken PRNG. If that is the
only environment you care about, then this extension is not useful.
TLS is used in many other environments, of course.

Well, I'm sorry.

There was not a single technical argument against the determination
that this extension is completely bogus in the discussion.


It is simply impossible to make up for the lack of entropy
(= secret randomness) with the addition of any amount of
published randomness, such as this extension suggests.


Get a cryptographer to make a convincing case for the value of
this extension in TLS, otherwise this extension should *NOT* be
standardized by the IETF.


-Martin
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