chair^

I don't think this has been a waste of time at all. Even if we decide
to make no changes, the discussion has brought forth a number of
interesting considerations not necessarily limited to SO, including
that of how tcpcrypt will perform in a world of quantum-resistant key
exchange.

member^

Regarding distinguishing role:

>> There are two simple ways of handling authentication, in this
>> scenario, depending on whether and how much you care about
>> distinguishing “which endpoint is which” in the process.
>
> Exactly.  The fact that applications currently have to chose between
> multiple ways of doing this means they may get it wrong.  Whereas having
> a session ID and a role is pretty simple.

What exactly is the issue here? You mentioned a client being tricked
into thinking it has connected to itself, but I think I need you to
spell out the worry here. In my earlier post, I was thinking it was
sufficient for an application to know it is (at least) one end of a
session identified by a particular SID, but I'm perfectly willing to
believe I'm missing something subtle here.

> But how is TCP's model symmetric?  Simultaneous open is this weird
> fringe case that didn't even work until we had NATs and firewalls to
> suppress SYNs that would otherwise trigger RST packets.  Even now it
> basically only works through particular kinds of NATs.  We can barely
> seem to find any examples of its use in practice.  Other than that, TCP
> is full of asymmetries on both the connection setup and shutdown.
> Someone with more historical perspective can correct me if I'm wrong,
> but it doesn't appear as though symmetry was a particular design goal of
> TCP.

Yeah, I am worried we're expending too much mental energy on SO
itself. But part of the reason I'm glad it was brought up is that I
still have no real idea what the TCP establishment thinks about the
expendability of SO considerations. I'd hate to put a lot of work into
something and have the tsv AD or IESG remand it because it turns out a
lot more people care about SO than we currently guess. That having
been said, my suspicion is that it won't be a problem if the naive
failure mode for an unmodified SO-based app, both endpoints of which
support TCPINC, is to fall back to unencrypted TCP. I can believe they
would have a problem with a failure mode in which SO applications fail
to connect.

Kyle

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