safe renegotiation bug?

Simon Josefsson simon at josefsson.org
Fri May 28 09:48:31 CEST 2010


Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav at gnutls.org> writes:

> Simon Josefsson wrote:
>
>>>>> Should be ok now. I get aborts in the srn5 but they seem intended?
>>>> I fixed that now -- however it seems there is another problem, now the
>>>> rehandshake succeeds against a server that doesn't support safe
>>>> renegotiation.  The second handshake in srn5 should fail, shouldn't it?
>>> By default server is on unsafe renegotiation mode and doesn't require
>>> any of the extensions, either on the first or subsequent negotiations.
>>> Disallowing rengotiations after this point for the client shouldn't
>>> offer any advantage since you are already connected securely to a peer.
>> 
>> But this self tests is with a server that has safe renegotiation
>> disabled, see tests/safe-renegotiation/srn5.c.
>> 
>> The client by default permits connections, but I don't think clients
>> should (by default) allow renegotiation against such servers.
>
> Why?

To me it was more that I couldn't answer 'Why not?'.  I'm not sure what
the balance should be.  We already decided that (by default) we can't
disable everything we know is insecure due to interop, so decisions
whether to enable/disable other things by default is subjective.

NSS does not allow upgraded clients to renegotiate with unupgraded
servers, see: https://developer.mozilla.org/NSS_3.12.6_release_notes

/Simon




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