ICMC18: TLS Panel Discussion

TLS Panel Discussion (S30b) Moderator: Tim Hudson, CTO and Technical Director, Cryptsoft Pty, Australia; Panelists: Brent Cook, OpenBSD, United States; David Hook, Director/Consultant, Crypto Workshop, Australia Rich Salz, Senior Architect, Akamai Technologies & Member, OpenSSL Dev Team, United States;

There are quite a few TLS implementations out there, in a variety of languages. David thinks this is generally a good thing, gets more people looking at the specification and working out the ambiguities. Brent agrees, it gets more people looking at it, lowers the chance of one security issue impacting all implementations. Rich noted that in the past that the way OpenSSL did it was the "Right Way" and people would write their code to interoperate with them, as opposed to against the specification, but he thinks it's better to have more as they fit different areas (like IoT).

There are a lot of implementations out there using the same crypto implementations, ASN.1 or X.509. That can be good, like the Russian gentleman who writes low level assembly to accelerate the algorithms - so everyone can be fast, but it's still good to see alternative implementations.

All of the panelists hear from their customers, getting interesting questions.  They generally have to be careful about turning things off, because you never know who is using an option or for what.

Bob Relyea noted users should be cautioned if they think they should write their own TLS library, when there are several very good ones out there. Forking is not always the answer, because it reduces the number of people looking at each implementation.  Let's make sure the ones we really care about have the right folks looking at them.

Brent notes that for him (OpenBSD) are more focused on TLS for an operating environment, and they are glad they forked. If OpenSSL hadn't wrapped their memory management like they did, folks and tools at OpenBSD would've found Heartbleed sooner.

Rich discussed the debate IETF had been having with financial institutions who wanted a way to observe traffic in the clear. The IETF did not want this and said no, they are a paranoid bunch. this means some companies won't be able to do with TLS 1.3 that they may have been able to do before. Encrypted will be encrypted.

Brent makes some deep debugging and injection tools, and also agrees, you don't want there to be an easy way to decrypt banking traffic.

Lots of great questions with quick answers that were hard to capture here, but a very enjoyable presentation.