Re: BofA+Netscape

[Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>]

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Here is a posting I made to www-security a few days ago when Netscape
announced SSL.  It did not get any response.  I see though that they at
least fixed their spelling...

Date: Sun, 27 Nov 1994 12:12:47 -0800
From: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
X-To: www-security@ns1.rutgers.edu
Subject: Re: info on proposed SSL protocol and Netscape implementation
Sender: owner-www-security@ns1.Rutgers.EDU

I have a few comments on the proposed SSL and Netscape's HTTP-SSL
that uses it.

First, CHALLENGE is consistently mis-spelled CHALLANGE throughout the SSL
document.

Second, 3 cyphers are specified in this version of the document: RC4,
RC2, and DES.  I would like to see 3DES and/or IDEA.  RC4 and RC2 have
not to my knowledge received much public scrutiny, and the 56 bit key
size of DES is of questionable security today.  Of course these would be
for the non-export versions.

Third, it is not clear how practical the use of X.509 certificates will
be.  For example, the "name" field in the certificate must somehow be
checked against the information which the client has about the server.
Typically this will just be a machine address like home.mcom.com or
something similar.  Is X.509 a good fit for this purpose?  I am not too
familiar with X.509 but generally the names that I have seen are not in
this form.

Fourth, it would be nice if there were some support for non-certificate
authentication of the server's public key.  For example, the client may
have obtained that key previously.  I believe SHTTP is more flexible in
this area.

Fifth, I don't really like the idea that the Netscape client
embeds "approved" certificate authority keys.  I suspect that the CA
situation is going to be in flux for quite a long time and one's client
could easily get out of date.  Note that the reliance on CA's seems to
have slowed the acceptance of PEM as a widely used standard.  PGP's
anarchic "web of trust" has perhaps been a better fit to net culture.

Sixth, the use of "https:" as a URL type for secure links provides
for a very strict separation of secure and non-secure connections.
Furthermore, this separation is chosen by the server operator.  I would
like to see a more flexible system, one where the client has more control
over what information is transferred securely.  The server may want to
set a minimum, and refuse to exchange certain information non-securely,
but it should not IMO also set the maximum.  Some clients may be more
privacy conscious than others.  Some may not want information about which
URL's they use to be available to local snoopers.  The Netscape approach
seems to put too much control into the hands of the servers and not
enough into the hands of the clients.

SHTTP also uses a special URL, but it seemed to be more open to the
possibility of a negotiation between client and server for secure
connections even on "http:" URLs.  This would be done by having backwards
compatibility with HTTP in which a non-secure-aware client or server
would ignore or reject the security enhancements.  The transaction could
then proceed in non-secure mode with appropriate information displays to
the user.  SSL does not appear to allow for this kind of compatibility.

Despite the negative tone here I think that SSL is potentially a good
step towards enhanced privacy on the net.  I think though that
eventually encryption will be used far more widely than Netscape seems
to have in mind.  The net is so insecure that I suspect people will
want privacy for all but the most casual uses.

Hal Finney
hfinney@shell.portal.com

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