ICMC17: TLS Panel Discussion

Tim Hudson - Cryptsoft
Steve Marquess - OpenSSL
David Hook - Bouincy Castle
Kenn White - Open Crypto Audit
Nicko van Someren - Linux Foundation

There are many implementations of TLS, from C and assembly implementations to Java implementations. OpenSSL has many forks - some obvious, some hidden under the covers. More implementations are good, as we don't want to suffer from monoculture.

There is possible value in creating a drop in API that multiple implementations could use. Nicko suggests creating an open process to create that API - it would not necessarily be from an existing implementation. It could possibly allow for more automation. APIs tend to grow out of necessity, and are not always pretty. A common API could help with security and fuzz testing.

There was then a long side discussion on libsodium (NACL), which is only a crypto library at this point as the "N" piece of networking/TLS hasn't been implemented, yet, but there are lots of language bindings out there.

How long does it take to create a new TLS library?  Apparently a new one was created recently in 3 weeks - leveraging someone else's crypto.  Language choice is important.

The older APIs have to consider legacy deployments, for example OpenSSL still supports VAX/VMS.  Another perspective - a new TLS implementation has taken another team 5 months already. When you have a user base you need to support, that seems to add time to the implementation.

There was a question about moving your implementation from TlS 1.0 to TLS 1.3? One of the OpenSSL developers noted that there is a lot of code reuse, but also a lot of #ifdefs. (TLS 1.0 is not, yet, #ifdef''d out of OpenSSL, but probably will be within the year).

There was a question about what is the biggest issue with FIPS validations? The general answer: consistency. That is, OpenSSL helped take multiple validations through at the same time, which was based on the same code and mostly the same documentation took a different amount of time and got completely different feedbacks.