A TLS padding extension
draft-agl-tls-padding-00

Abstract

This memo describes the a TLS extension that can be used to pad ClientHello messages to a desired size.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

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This Internet-Draft will expire on May 5, 2014.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2013 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Requirements Notation
• 3. Padding Extension
• 4. IANA Considerations
• 5. Normative References
• Author's Address

1. Introduction

Successive TLS versions have added support for more cipher suites and, over time, more TLS extensions have been defined. This has caused the size of the TLS ClientHello to grow and the additional size has caused some implementation bugs to come to light. At least some of these implementation bugs can be ameliorated by making the ClientHello even larger.

This memo describes a TLS extension that can be used to pad a ClientHello to a desired size in order to avoid implementation bugs caused by certain ClientHello sizes.

2. Requirements Notation

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

3. Padding Extension

A new extension type ("padding(TBD)") is defined and MAY be included by the client in its ClientHello message.

enum {
        padding(TBD), (65535)
} ExtensionType

The server MUST ignore the presence of the extension and its contents. As a consequence, the server MUST NOT echo the extension.

The client MAY fill the padding extension with zero or more, arbitrary bytes. As the contents of the extension are completely arbitrary, no structure is defined here.

4. IANA Considerations

IANA is requested to assign an extension value for the padding extension from its ExtensionType registry.

5. Normative References

Author's Address