Hi Rich,

On 11/17/21 7:18 AM, Salz, Rich wrote:
Peter has said it more colorfully than I have:

    Not necessarily.  Since TLS 1.3 has forked TLS into two protocols, 1.0-1.2 
and
     1.3 (lets call them TLS family A and TLS family B), there are a large 
number
     of users who will be sticking with the TLS A rather than TLS B family for 
an

But he is right. At least Amazon, CloudFlare, and Facebook have had implementations of 
TLS 1.3 that handed off the connection to "legacy code" if it was an earlier 
version.  (Of course, I don't know if they still do that.)

To repeat myself from yesterday:  "I agree that if you have supported_versions than 
you probably also have a 1.3-capable stack.  But it is also possible to have the first 
without the second." And to be more direct: the draft SHOULD separate those two 
cases.

I think 7525bis does separate the two cases. To me the question is whether we achieve anything by that a 1.2-only stack should implement the "supported_versions" extension. Here's my reasoning (please do correct me if I'm wrong)...

With regard to a TLS 1.2-only client, by my reading RFC 8446 says:

- if the client does not send the supported_versions extension then a server that supports both 1.2 and 1.3 will negotiate 1.2

- if the client does not send the supported_versions extension then presumably the value of that extension and of the legacy_version field will both be set to 0x0303, in which case again a server that supports both 1.2 and 1.3 will negotiate 1.2

Ergo: why should a 1.2-only client add support for the supported_versions extension?

With regard to a TLS 1.2-only server, by my reading RFC 8446 says:

- if the server receives the supported_versions extension and it supports the extension, it will only negotiate 1.2 because it doesn't support 1.3

- if the server receives the supported_versions extension (say, from a 1.3 client) but doesn't support the extension, then it will negotiate 1.2

Ergo: why should a 1.2-only server add support for the supported_versions extension?

Am I missing something?

Peter

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