This document is not an application profile standard, in the sense of
    Section 9 of [RFC5246].  As a result, clients and servers are still
    REQUIRED to support the mandatory TLS cipher suite,
    TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA.

A BCP defining cipher suite recommendations should not have a higher
level of requirement for TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA than it has for
TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA, at least. I think it is OK to just
say that the TLS specification was wrong to mandate
TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA, or don't mention it at all.

I don't know if RFC 5246 was *wrong*, but the situation on the ground has 
changed since 2008.

I was wondering about the above as well. I think your document is updating MTI 
or at least narrowing down recommended choices, and CBC_SHA is not one of them. 
So deleting the two sentences quoted above is the best.

And in fact the text currently says:

   This document is not an application profile standard, in the sense of
   Section 9 of [RFC5246].  As a result, clients and servers are still
   REQUIRED to support the mandatory TLS cipher suite,
   TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA.

So I'd agree with Yaron here.

IMHO, a distinction without a difference. Anybody complying with your spec will 
need to implement a larger set of ciphers, so you are effectively extending the 
MTI list.

Which reminds me of something else: some application protocols specify explicit 
MTI TLS ciphers, which are different from the above. So now that I thought 
about that, I really dislike the paragraph you quoted above. So maybe change it 
to something more neutral:

This document doesn't change mandatory-to-implement TLS cipher suite(s) 
prescribed by TLS and application protocols using TLS.

But I would rather drop the whole paragraph, as it weakens the whole document.


I think we should be explicit about the cipher suite, even if we dislike it. So how about:

This document doesn't change mandatory-to-implement TLS cipher suite(s) prescribed by TLS and application protocols using TLS. To maximize interoperability, RFC 5246 REQUIRES implementation of the TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA cipher suite, which is significantly weaker than the cipher suites recommended here. Implementers should consider the interoperability gain against the loss in security when deploying this cipher suite. Other application protocols specify other cipher suites as mandatory to implement (MTI).

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