On 27 Oct 2016, at 11:03, Bob Harold wrote:

On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 12:43 PM, Sara Dickinson <[email protected]> wrote:
So I’m not sure here. The aim here was to try to keep this section
flexible in terms of the interpretation of OS but perhaps this needs
discussion.

It seems like it does need discussion.

RFC 7435 says "An OS protocol first determines the capabilities of the peer with which it is attempting to communicate. Peer capabilities may be
discovered by out-of-band or in-band means.  (Out-of-band mechanisms
include the use of DANE records….”
and then allows for the hard failure if the capability isn’t as described. So this seems to leave the door open for clients to choose to hard-fail in certain circumstances which seem relevant to this document (I don’t see any caveats about this only happening if users know what is going on). It seems
overkill to completely override that here with something like
"Opportunistic clients MUST fallback to clear text…” unless there is
consensus that that is how it should work for DNS in all cases?

It seems that there are levels of Opportunistic Security (OS), either
falling back to TLS to an un-authenticated server, or falling back to clear text (no TLS). We should make it clear that there are various levels, and
that there should be some way to choose what minimum level is allowed.

I will admit that I thought there was just one bottom level of OS in our discussion, cleartext. If there are two (cleartext; no communication), the document needs more discussion in multiple places because it would be surprising to any implementer who didn't follow the long discussion during the end stages of RFC 7435.

Which users do we think would not want to negotiate weak TLS (such as DES-MD2) but would be willing to go to cleartext? For other than crypto experts (who are likely to only want Strict), how would weak TLS be worse than cleartext?

It feels like this is adding a layer of operational complexity for an audience who probably doesn't exist.

--Paul Hoffman

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