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On 3 September 2014 11:34:09 BST, Yutaka OIWA <[email protected]> wrote:
>The document title is
>"Recommendations for Secure Use of TLS and DTLS",
>clearly applicable for the "Secure Uses".  It also says
>"These are minimum recommendations for the general use of TLS."
>
>For the purposes of such secure and general use cases,
>NULL ciphers are clearly "MUST NOT" with no doubt.
>
>If you have any "insecure", special (non-general) use cases of TLS,
>the document do not forbid you to use it,
>because the document is simply not applicable.
>However, such special use cases shall not make any
>hindrance for making a BCP document for general use cases.
>
>If you worry for implementors to drop codes for special use cases,
>you should say it loud to implementors, not to this document.
>Also, if you worry for making it hard to use, it is the
>fair cost for non-generic but supported use cases.
>Security libraries easily configurable for insecure setting
>is a huge security concern for general applications.
>
>One possible solution is to add a short note about
>such special uses, saying "it's out of this document's scope,
>but you should really take care of its security setting and
>consequences by yourself."

+1.

"MUST NOT transmit cleartext in TLS" in a BCP for general use on the internet 
is quite obviously the correct path. Any suggestion to the contrary is, with 
respect, indefensible.

That does not preclude very exceptional internal configurations which really do 
not require confidentiality: that isn't a general internet TLS profile at all, 
but one that obviously will require very special attention from all 
participants, who are free to agree whatever they'd like, BCPs be damned.

It's still not a good idea (or best current practice) to ever neglect to 
encrypt data where an attacker wanting it could conceivably be, however 
(including even internal networks, as Google, Yahoo and others have learned 
this year), and I'd continue to support and advocate NULL ciphersuites' 
complete removal from TLS 1.3 - and from all existing implementations of TLS in 
general use in the wild where it remains.

Wanting authenticated cleartext on any network (or local socket) is in my view 
such a very extraordinary, unusual and/or potentially dangerous scenario that 
I'd actually go as far as to suggest that anyone who REALLY honestly actually 
needs to use it ever should actually need to explicitly patch it back in - so 
that all involved know thereby that, truly, here be insatiably hungry, 
data-eating dragons. Actually using NULL is likely to be a decision they may 
later regret: we owe it to them to tell them so. (They would probably be much 
better served, if it's really that important to them, by not using TLS but 
something even more efficient, say Poly1305; or perhaps even simpler, 
non-cryptographic, access control mechanisms if a security boundary isn't 
actually being crossed.)

- --
/akr
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