I don't think we would go down the route of making other types of
ciphersuites mandatory to implement.  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bernard Aboba [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> Sent: Monday, October 23, 2006 9:17 AM
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: RE: [Emu] Tying EAP-TLS method type to specific ciphersuites
> 
> During the EMU BOF we talked about the high cost that would 
> be imposed on customers by introducing new non-certificate 
> ciphersuites during EAP-TLS.
> 
> EAP-TLS is now ten years old, and has a very large installed base.  
> Virtually all of these installations only support 
> certificate-based authentication, since that is a requirement 
> of RFC 2716, which states:
> 
>    If the EAP server is not resuming a previously established
>    session, then it MUST include a TLS server_certificate handshake
>    message, and a server_hello_done handshake message MUST be the last
>    handshake message encapsulated in this EAP-Request packet....
> 
>    If the EAP server sent a certificate_request message in 
> the preceding EAP-Request packet, then
>    the peer MUST send, in addition, certificate and 
> certificate_verify handshake messages.
> 
> As a result of these and other specification requirements, an 
> implementation that does not support certificate 
> authentication is non-compliant with RFC 2716.
> 
> During the BOF we also talked about the drawbacks of 
> attempting to support 
> both certificate and non-certificate modes in a single EAP 
> method.   Such an 
> approach would require embedded systems to take on the 
> footprint of certificate handling even when all they really 
> needed to do was to support pre-shared keys.  It would also 
> add new potential security vulnerabilities to one of the few 
> EAP methods that has provable security properties.
> 
> In addition adding new non-certificate modes would impose 
> large costs on customers. Today there are interoperability 
> and conformance test suites for EAP-TLS that assume that only 
> certificate-based authentication is supported. 
>   In addition, EAP-TLS has been approved for use within FIPS 
> 140-2 installations, based on support for certificate-base 
> ciphersuites.  
> Introducing new non-certificate modes would introduce 
> confusion, and would force existing test suites to be re-written.
> 
> For customers, deployment of EAP is difficult enough without 
> introducing confusion, interoperability problems and new 
> security vulnerabilities into the one EAP method that today 
> is synonmous with high security.
> 
> 
> 
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> 

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