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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

So, Thomas, when do I get to say "I told you so"?

Soon. As soon there's a well-reviewed workable alternative to TLS, I'll be right there with you, and I will write up something permanent as a concession/mea-culpa.

I still think TLS is a much better plan than inventing ones own encrypted transport. As things like UKS show: these things are hard to get right.

For what it's worth: reading the whole backlog of the IETF TLS WG mailing list probably did more to move my opinion closer to yours than anything else.

One thing that would limit feature creep would have the TLS WG maintain a POSIX reference library implementation, standard library compatibility interface (header file) and a comprehensive test suite. Because once the maintenance of that hits the people making suggestions and decisions, priorities will adjusted. (It still takes work to do the right thing regardless, but at least there would be a baseline, and behavior across implementations would be more comparable.)

Also, accelerate the sunset of older specs so that deployed code will have to stay more current to even function, rather than interop'ing with old code that will never be patched.

I'm not so sure. Look at Heartbleed: the vulnerable reference code was committed by the person who wrote the Internet Draft.

But then they would think twice before furthering "...serves too many interests, and (particularly in the TLS portion of the tree) is a grab bag of functionality" [0] of un-security-like features like heartbeats. They might think: "Do I really want to write tests and a demo for this, or can I make do with something simpler?"

If not, then this suggests a lack of clear guiding principles of what is in-scope and what is not &| insufficient questioning of adding new features.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7566456

I think that is a real problem, yes; I also think that problem is endemic to open standards groups.

But that's not an acceptable assessment of leadership for a vital crypto WG, much less the leading implementation. So far, OpenSSL has added one dev and it seems like business as usual. Does anyone know if anything's changed at TLS WG (I'm not on the mailing lists)?

In other news, I ported LibreSSL to OSX today[0].

[0] https://github.com/steakknife/libressl

I'm not sure what to tell you. I follow the mailing lists but very deliberately don't post on them, because I would drastically increase the noise level, which is already often bad. I can say that it does not look like the TLS WG has a "default deny" stance w/r/t/ new features for TLS.

I like what Google is doing; they control the Internet's most important server properties and one of the most important clients, and are taking full advantage of that to testbed TLS refinements and then bring them to the IETF as working code.

That's what I was after... confirmation that it's a Tragedy of the Commons.

There's political ammo now to make necessary changes in how things are done to make sure OpenSSL, TLS WG doesn't continue with business-as-usual.

Careful, last time I made this as a top level comment, he pretty much lost it on me.

Let's see if everyone can understand the difference between a longstanding technical debate and a deliberate attack on my character.

Dual_EC was the former, and I have no idea how you would have interpreted it as a personal attack. But this probably isn't worth a subthread.

Edit: I've said it before, I greatly appreciate the crypto knowledge you share on HN. When crypto related submissions come up, I often click comments before reading the articles just to see your take on it. I did it just this afternoon with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7642434 and was disappointed to see you had not weighed in yet.

Like I said, this is just drama. I like a lot of your comments too.

You should link to that comment so we can all see the context and judge for ourselves. :)

(sidenote: I'm very happy about all the attention SSL related stuff is getting. Just like Snowden said, encryption is our best defense against whoever and all the SSL stuff is the most commonly used encryption out there. Don't know what to do about dis-honest CAs though...).

EDIT: tptacek is probably right that this is drama and my sidenote should probably be the main comment

I'm guessing it's this, but I didn't go too far back in the comment history so I may be wrong:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7430250

This is really just drama (I'm equally culpable here on this thread). Let's talk about TLS and UKS instead.

No, it wasn't that. That one was a bit silly (admittedly, so is this thread, and the one it references). I'll find it and edit this post.

Edit: linked upthread in my other comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6944360

[deleted] is tptacek's comment I'm referring to, but it's quoted in the thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6420306 was a previous episode of the same debate.

tl;dr The issue was whether or not Dual EC was an NSA backdoor, and then whether or not there were any implementations. There was a time when tptacek denied both of these, saying it was too dumb to be a backdoor, and later conceding but saying it wasn't used in any software.

Interestingly, before the NSA paying RSA scandal came out, my post in the second linked thread says:

> Edit: Actually, I take that back. I have no problem believing that RSA Security are perfectly sane. Would we be completely shocked if the reason they chose a questionable default was due to coercion from the spooks? Only NSA has the keys, so it's a pretty safe backdoor.

Only 215 days ago, that sounded like tinfoil hat tier speculation.

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