Comment by ekr____

Comment by ekr____ 21 hours ago

3 replies

This seems like a truly unreasonable level of political skill for nearly any setting. We're talking about changing every endpoint in the Internet, including those which can no longer be upgraded. I struggle to think of any entity or set of entities which could plausibly do that.

Moreover, even in the best case scenario this means that you don't get the benefits of deployment for years if not decades. Even 7 years out, TLS 1.3 is well below 100% deployment. To take a specific example here: we want to deploy PQ ciphers ASAP to prevent harvest-and-decrypt attacks. Why should this wait for 100% deployment?

> The big downside of negotiation is that no one ever has to commit to anything so everything is possible. In the case of TLS, that seems to have led to endless bikeshedding which has created a standard which has so many options is is hardly a standard anymore. The only part that has to be truly standard is the negotiation scheme.

I don't think this is really that accurate, especially on the Web. The actual widely in use options are fairly narrow.

TLS is used in a lot of different settings, so it's unsurprising that there are a lot of options to cover those settings. TLS 1.3 did manage to reduce those quite a bit, however.

Sophira 21 hours ago

> This seems like a truly unreasonable level of political skill for nearly any setting. We're talking about changing every endpoint in the Internet, including those which can no longer be upgraded. I struggle to think of any entity or set of entities which could plausibly do that.

Case in point: IPv6 adoption. There's no interoperability or negotiation between it and IPv4 (at least, not in any way that matters), which has led to the mess we're in today.

  • vladvasiliu 19 hours ago

    Many servers and clients support both ipv4 and ipv6. So, in a sense, there's a "negotiation" happening between client and server.

    • happyopossum 18 hours ago

      That’s not negotiating- I can’t connect to a server over v4 and have it tell me to switch to v6 or vice versa. That’s just supporting 2 completely different protocols.