Why TLS is called "TLS", not "SSL 3.1"

http://tim.dierks.org/2014/05/security-standards-and-name-changes-in.html

by timdierks • 12 years ago

229 35 12 years ago

tim.dierks.org

chewxy• 12 years ago

The more I read into specifications and standardization stuff, the more amazed I am at how political we geeks can get.

taeric3• 12 years ago

I'm always amused by the attitude that "politics is what other people do."

And it isn't just politics. Some of the sleeziest, "salesman" tricks I have ever seen came from fellow developers pushing something.

leorocky3• 12 years ago

The only tricks I'll buy from fellow developers are competent solutions focused on the problem at hand. Focus and competence. Often it is nought for us to decide the product we work on, simply the approach.

Whatever is optimal. I'm not saying what you're saying doesn't happen, it does, but I feel like I've wizened, and when you stick to objective facts, not subjective crap, even at the expense of making your friends unhappy with you, you'll have found a cure. In a good engineering department facts are a sharp sword that can cut through bullshit as if it were butter. Be careful though, that edge doesn't care who wields it, it'll cut down your own bullshit and errors too. Personally I welcome having bad ideas and incorrect knowledge slain from my mind.

kennytuan• 12 years ago

đổ mực máy in canon giá rẻ quan tâm hiên hệ nhé

http://thaymucmayin.litado.vn/do-muc-may-in-canon

jmnicolas• 12 years ago

Geeks are humans too you know ;-)

Already__Taken• 12 years ago

I think you'll like this; http://vimeo.com/9270320

tptacek5• 12 years ago

Schneier was definitely famous in the late '90s, when this decision was made; he was famous almost immediately after the publication of Applied Cryptography, which came out when I was in high school.

SSL 2.0 is a disaster. The handshake isn't protected. Records (the data unit of SSL/TLS) do have MACs, but the MAC is secret-prefix MD5, with a key shared by encryption. Record MACs are also inconsistently applied. All of these problems are probably worse than any of the major TLS bugs --- renegotiation, BEAST, CRIME, RC4, Lucky13 --- that followed SSL 2.0.

Paul Kocher is the author of SSL 3.0, but also famous as one of the first (possibly the first) researcher to publish on side channel attacks --- he released a technical paper on square-and-multiply timing against RSA in the '90s. He founded Cryptography Research, which later built the as-yet-unbroken pay TV card system and the Blu-ray BD+ DRM system, along with publishing a crapload of crypto research.

timdierks3• 12 years ago

There's "famous", below that, maybe "wonk famous" and then there's "nerd famous". At the time, Bruce was only the latter, at best; in fact, probably only at the lower, entry-level, "crypto nerd famous". Now, he's arguably wonk famous (that is, within epsilon, everyone on HN has heard of him, a reasonable fraction of readers of the NYT op-ed page will recognize his name, but less than 5% of the US population).

Yes, I think Paul is probably the mass-market father of side channel attacks; I believe he has the first published research on power use attacks and he's also done good work on timing attacks.

And, yes, SSL 2 is a mess: it was only not-broken enough (with the info we had at the time) to not be an SSL 1 or heartbleed-like "patch ALL the software" crisis.

tptacek5• 12 years ago

He was "prominently featured in Wired magazine" famous.

Power and timing attacks are examples of side-channel attacks. :)

chris_wot2• 12 years ago

Thank you for that excellent explanation of the taxonomy of geek fame.

omh2• 12 years ago

SSL 2.0 is a disaster

How bad is this? I have internet-facing production web servers running software which (unfortunately) does not support TLS even in the most recent versions.

Are there practical attacks I should be worried about?

cmircea• 12 years ago

Yes. SSL 3.0 is okay, but not 2.0.

yuhong2• 12 years ago

Yea, I think it took until 2006 before IE and Firefox was able to disable SSLv2. SNI doesn't work with SSLv3 though, and the increasing IP address crunch and the obsolescence of XP/Server 2003 will make it more common.

omh2• 12 years ago

So they couldn't call it "SSL 3" because it couldn't be seen to be the Netscape proposal - fair enough. But it's a shame they didn't take the simpler route and just call it "SSL 4".

tptacek5• 12 years ago

It's actually frustrating that the SSL name lived on at all. A clean break would have been better. The parts of TLS that are derived from the original SSL 2.0 system (mainly the ciphersuites) are a plague.

TLS is also a better name than SSL. A "socket" is an implementation concept. TLS really does secure the transport layer.

yuhong2• 12 years ago

I would not go that far, but they could have fixed some flaws. Remember Bleichenbacher for example?

ambrop7• 12 years ago

Correction: While the socket is an implementation concept in some implementations, it generally is not. From RFC 793 (TCP):

To allow for many processes within a single Host to use TCP communication facilities simultaneously, the TCP provides a set of addresses or ports within each host. Concatenated with the network and host addresses from the internet communication layer, this forms a socket. A pair of sockets uniquely identifies each connection. That is, a socket may be simultaneously used in multiple connections.

But then, it is a TCP specific concept, and TLS is a better name because it can be used on top of other transport layers.

joveian• 12 years ago

I agree for the most part, although as someone who wasn't really paying attention at the time it took me a surprisingly long time to figure out that TLS didn't just mean Thread Local Storage :/.

timdierks3• 12 years ago

That was seen as politically too close to Netscape's position. If you weren't there, you have no idea: Microsoft/Netscape was a trench war.

SoftwareMaven• 12 years ago

To give some flavor: I was working at a 3D modeling company that was working on a license deal with MS to provide models for the new Direct3D. We needed a way to browse and visualize models; Java applets was all the rage, and I even found a cool voxel component that would let people see the geometry without giving them the actual geometry.

MS and Netscape both had a set of "foundation classes". Netscape's were much, much better, so, given the time constraints, I used those. Because of a little bit of window dressing in the scroll bars, somebody from a recent acquisition noticed it was Netscape's classes and, by itself, that killed my project and almost killed the entire deal.

The nineties were an ugly time for software development, thanks to Microsoft.

pacaro• 12 years ago

When I worked in Windows Security (BitLocker FWIW), Barb Fox's office was a windowless closet with an antique computer and a bunch of boxes in it that hadn't been touched in years. I've no idea what she was doing at that time, but nobody ever saw her and her stuff was religiously moved to a new closet every time we moved buildings...

timdierks3• 12 years ago

Depending on the exact year, going to standards meetings, probably. (If I recall, she spent some time on leave after being active in security standards but before she left Microsoft.)

Now, she's apparently making chocolate: http://www.insidetucsonbusiness.com/news/profiles/after-appl... and http://www.chocolatefox.com/

matthiasb• 12 years ago

There is an interesting comment below the article: "Yuhong BaoMay 23, 2014 at 10:14 AM

On this matter, anyone remember the Netscape random number generator bug: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/ddj-netscape.html Notice the paragraph at the end about RSA Data Security!"

x86dev• 12 years ago

And if you look at a TLS 1.0 handshake message you'll see 15 03 01

lectrick• 12 years ago

As a part of the cutthroat competition, Microsoft decided to revise the SSL 2 protocol with some additions of their own, and specified a protocol called "PCT" that was derived from SSL 2. It was only supported in IE and IIS.

These motherfuckers...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Why TLS is called "TLS", not "SSL 3.1"

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