Internet DRAFT - draft-davidben-tls-alps-half-rtt
draft-davidben-tls-alps-half-rtt
TLS D. Benjamin
Internet-Draft Google LLC
Intended status: Informational 3 December 2020
Expires: 6 June 2021
Comparing ALPS and Half-RTT Data
draft-davidben-tls-alps-half-rtt-00
Abstract
This document compares the Application Layer Protocols Settings
extension with the half-RTT feature in TLS 1.3.
Status of This Memo
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Using Half-RTT Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1. Half-RTT Delimiter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2. Non-Integer HTTP Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.3. Early Data and Session Tickets . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.4. Client Certificates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.5. TLS Terminators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.6. TCP Flow Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3. Using ALPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.1. Half-RTT Delimiter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.2. Non-Integer HTTP Settings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.3. Early Data and Session Tickets . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.4. Client Certificates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.5. TLS Terminators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.6. TCP Flow Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1. Introduction
An application-layer protocol often starts with both parties
negotiating parameters under which the protocol operates; for
instance, HTTP/2 [RFC7540] and HTTP/3 [I-D.ietf-quic-http] use a
SETTINGS frame to exchange the list of protocol parameters supported
by each endpoint. This can achieved by waiting for TLS handshake
[RFC8446] to complete and then performing the application-layer
handshake within the application protocol itself.
This approach, however, means application protocols must wait for a
secondary negotiation to complete, often incurring network round-
trip. HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 mitigate this with a best-effort negotiation
scheme: clients do not wait for server SETTINGS before sending a
request. But then, by the time the client applies the setting, it
has already sent the first request based on the default values. This
limits the kinds of extensions possible. For example, the SETTINGS
frame cannot support negotiate header compression [QUIC-3622] or a
different static table [HTTP2-788] without changing the protocol to
disable compression by default and switch partway through.
Protocol selection is another example of application-level
negotiation with these trade-offs. The Application Layer Protocol
Negotiation (ALPN) extension [RFC7301] adds protocol selection into
the TLS handshake. ALPN is instead consistently ordered before all
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application data, including TLS 1.3 early data, without either a
round-trip penalty or the need to send initial pre-negotiation data
(see Section 3.2 of [RFC7540]).
The Application Layer Protocol Settings (ALPS) extension
[I-D.vvv-tls-alps] implements [QUIC-3086-COMMENT] and adds a similar
mechanism for settings within the protocol. It sends ALPN-specific
protocol settings strings in the handshake, which can be ordered
correctly relative to application data and integrated with TLS 1.3
early data negotiation.
As an alternative, Section 4.4.4 of [RFC8446] allows a server to send
application data after the server Finished message, often referred to
as half-RTT data. Half-RTT data is not a complete solution to the
settings problem, however. This document describes the other changes
necessary and compares the approach to ALPS.
2. Using Half-RTT Data
Although not currently widely-implemented, half-RTT data can be used
to deliver HTTP/2 SETTINGS and other values at the right round-trip.
This would result in a handshake flow like the following.
Client Server
ClientHello -------->
ServerHello
...
{Finished}
<-------- [HTTP/2 SETTINGS]
...
{Finished}
[HTTP/2 SETTINGS] -------->
[HTTP/2 requests] <-------> [HTTP/2 responses]
The approach, however, requires a number of additional changes and
protocol interactions to work correctly.
2.1. Half-RTT Delimiter
In this design, the client waits to receive the HTTP/2 SETTINGS frame
before sending requests. However, HTTP/2 servers are not required to
send SETTINGS in half-data today, and most existing ones do not.
[[TODO: Did I ever write this down anywhere I can link to? When I
probed TLS 1.3 HTTP/2 servers, I found none that send half-RTT
data.]] Without a new signal to the client, waiting would add a
latency penalty to existing servers. TLS 1.3 does not include a
delimiter between half-RTT data and the rest of the server
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application stream, so the client does not know a priori when it is
done reading.
One option would be a TLS extension that adds a delimiter between
half-RTT and normal server application data. The client would then
wait for that delimiter without round-trip penalty and proceed. This
would not work in QUIC because QUIC does not use TLS for application
data at all. Instead, half-RTT data would need to be lifted into the
handshake, which is the ALPS extension.
Alternatively, the client could rely on application protocol
semantics, and assume the protocol defines exactly what is sent in
half-RTT. However, HTTP/2 does not do this today. This would
require defining new HTTP/2.1 and HTTP/3.1 protocols with a MUST-
level requirement to send half-RTT SETTINGS. HTTP/2.1 and HTTP/3.1
would be negotiated via ALPN. Note both HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 must be
updated because, per Section 3.2 of [I-D.ietf-quic-http],
connectivity problems can break QUIC and clients are encouraged to
fall back to a TCP-based version of HTTP.
2.2. Non-Integer HTTP Settings
The HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 SETTINGS frame can only carry integer values,
but extensions may need to carry variable-length data. For example,
[I-D.davidben-http-client-hint-reliability] uses a string value.
[I-D.bishop-httpbis-extended-settings] proposes an EXTENDED_SETTINGS
frame to fix this. If defining HTTP/2.1 and HTTP/3.1,
EXTENDED_SETTINGS can be added as a mandatory component of the new
protocols.
If EXTENDED_SETTINGS is left optional, the client needs to know
whether to expect a half-RTT EXTENDED_SETTINGS frame after half-RTT
SETTINGS, to avoid the issues discussed in Section 2.1. Thus
SETTINGS would need to contain a SETTINGS_EXTENDED_SETTINGS setting
to indicate more half-RTT frames are coming.
[HTTPWG-COMMENT] suggested tabling EXTENDED_SETTINGS in favor of
extensions defining new HTTP frames. That would not work here,
absent each extension additionally defining an analog to
SETTINGS_EXTENDED_SETTINGS, to signal to the client to expect a new
frame.
2.3. Early Data and Session Tickets
TLS 1.3 introduces early data, which allows clients to send
application data before receiving a ServerHello from the server.
[RFC8470] describes how to use it in HTTP.
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Application-level connection properties additionally must be
established before the client sends early data. Otherwise if, for
instance, HPACK static tables are negotiated, the client will not be
able to encode the early request. Note Section 2 of [RFC8470] says
early data in HTTP is conceptually concatenated with other
application data, so early data and 1-RTT data in HTTP must share
decoding rules.
Early data is sent before any response from the server, so connection
properties are typically carried over from the ticket.
Section 4.2.10 of [RFC8446] describes the mechanism for the ALPN
extension: Each PSK has an associated ALPN protocol, determined from
the previous connection. The client sends early data assuming that
protocol was used. If the server negotiates a different value, it
rejects early data.
Reliably-ordered protocol settings would require a similar
construction. However TLS does not define ALPN's early data behavior
generally, so every application protocol would need to define it
themselves and, when implementing, rely on various callback
interfaces in the TLS implementation.
This also introduces a dependency between NewSessionTicket and the
server application data stream: the NewSessionTicket is not
meaningful without part of the server application data (here, the
SETTINGS and EXTENDED_SETTINGS frames). Moreover, in QUIC and DTLS,
post-handshake messages are not ordered relative to application data,
so the client may receive NewSessionTicket messages in the wrong
order. The client then cannot store sessions in the TLS session
until some application-defined point. This requires further
integration between TLS and the application protocol.
See related discussion in [QUIC-436], [QUIC-2790], and [QUIC-2945].
Note HTTP/3 addressed the ordering issue by making associating
settings with the ticket optional on the client [QUIC-2972], while a
solution to this problem makes it mandatory.
2.4. Client Certificates
TLS APIs are often structured around the following sequence of
operations:
1. The calling application configures TLS parameters. This may
include preferred cipher suites, client certificate requirements,
callbacks to defer some configuration, etc.
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2. The calling application runs the handshake to some notion of
completion. Before the handshake completes, connection
properties are not established, the peer is not authenticated,
and the application does not read or write data.
3. The calling application queries handshake properties. It may
query the negotiated ALPN protocol to determine how to proceed in
the application protocol. It may query the peer certificate for
application-level access checks.
4. The calling application reads and writes data according to the
application protocol.
This is analogous to many TCP socket APIs, where there is a "connect"
or "accept" operation that completes before "recv" and "send"
operations are available.
In server connections that do not resume a session, the TLS 1.3 half-
RTT point has different semantics from a complete TLS handshake. The
client's identity has not been established yes, so TLS
implementations cannot transparently report the connection as ready
to the calling application. Doing so risks security issues (the
application's client certificate requirements are not yet checked)
and compatibility breaks (the application cannot usefully query the
peer certificate).
Instead, the TLS implementation might expose a separate interface for
an earlier partial completion state. The application would then
write half-RTT data, knowing that client authentication requirements
are not yet met. This complicates the interface and the above
structure. Alternatively, the TLS implementation may require the
application configure a byte string to send as half-RTT data during
the handshake, but note this risks the deadlocks described in
Section 2.6.
2.5. TLS Terminators
Some server deployments use a TLS terminator which then makes a TCP
connection to some backend application server. These deployments
would need to preserve any MUST-level requirements to send SETTINGS
in half-RTT data. A TLS terminator which completes the handshake and
then proxies data from the backend server would inadvertently add a
round-trip delay to the SETTINGS frame, delaying HTTP requests.
However, a TLS terminator which begins proxying data at the half-RTT
point instead risks skipping client certificate authentication.
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Instead, the TLS terminator must coordinate with the backend server
to determine what data may be sent early to unauthenticated clients,
and what data is bulk application traffic.
2.6. TCP Flow Control
If not implemented properly, this design risks deadlocks with TCP
flow control [TCP-TLS]. It is possible for both the client Finished
flight and the server half-RTT data to exceed transport buffers. The
server must read the client Finished flight and complete the
handshake, even if the half-RTT data has not been written to the
wire.
In particular, a TLS implementation may try to avoid the issues in
Section 2.4 by treating half-RTT as a configured string sent as part
of the handshake, rather than exposing a writable stream to the
calling application. This strategy must still write half-RTT data in
parallel with completing the handshake to avoid a deadlock. Many TLS
implementations are layered on top of non-blocking TCP socket APIs,
which means the calling application would still be responsible for
driving these parallel operations. This changes the I/O patterns the
application expects from TLS.
3. Using ALPS
The ALPS strategy is described in [I-D.vvv-tls-alps] and
[I-D.vvv-httpbis-alps]. It implements [QUIC-3086-COMMENT], sending
application settings in the EncryptedExtensions on both client and
server. The client half is not strictly necessary (TLS 1.3 is always
writable on the client first), but simplifies server implementations
in QUIC, where application data streams are not ordered relative to
each other.
Client Server
ClientHello -------->
ServerHello
{EncryptedExtensions}
+ alps(HTTP/2 SETTINGS)
...
<-------- {Finished}
{EncryptedExtensions}
+ alps(HTTP/2 SETTINGS)
...
{Finished}
[HTTP/2 requests] <-------> [HTTP/2 responses]
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3.1. Half-RTT Delimiter
ALPS does not require a half-RTT delimiter. The entire payload is
sent in the EncryptedExtensions message, which includes a common
framing for extension values.
3.2. Non-Integer HTTP Settings
As in half-RTT data, an ALPS mechanism for HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 must
handle the SETTINGS frame limitations. [I-D.vvv-httpbis-alps] allows
the ALPS payload to contain multiple frames, so either the
[I-D.bishop-httpbis-extended-settings] or [HTTPWG-COMMENT] strategies
may be used. The payload is already framed in EncryptedExtensions,
so there is no need for an indicator value like
SETTINGS_EXTENDED_SETTINGS.
3.3. Early Data and Session Tickets
As in the half-RTT strategy, ALPS requires early data and session
ticket integration. However, this behavior is part of the extension
itself, so, like ALPN, there is no need to specify and implement this
additional logic for each application protocol.
Unlike the application-level integration for half-RTT data, this TLS-
level integration for ALPS does not have ordering issues with
NewSessionTicket. NewSessionTicket messages are ordered relative to
the handshake, so the ALPS values will always be available before a
NewSessionTicket.
3.4. Client Certificates
As in ALPN and the half-RTT strategy, the server ALPS value is sent
before receiving the client certificate. In ALPS, this would be part
of the extension semantics exposed to application protocols, just as
ALPN configuration is not protected by client certificates.
3.5. TLS Terminators
As in the half-RTT solution, ALPS requires a TLS terminator
deployment to coordinate with its backend server to separate the
early, unauthenticated SETTINGS data from the rest of the stream.
However, the payload is already naturally kept separate from the rest
of the application stream. Instead, the settings values are an
analog of the ALPN value, which already requires coordination.
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3.6. TCP Flow Control
ALPS sends the settings values in-band in the TLS handshake, rather
than afterwards, so the deadlock risks described in [TCP-TLS] do not
apply. The client will read the entire EncryptedExtensions message
(and more) before trying to send the client Certificate,
CertificateVerify, and Finished.
4. Security Considerations
Any server information delivered in time for the client's first
application data records must be sent before checking client
certificates. Section 2.4 and Section 3.4 discuss strategies for
ensuring the calling application does not inadvertently reveal
sensitive information to unauthenticated clients.
5. IANA Considerations
This document has no IANA considerations.
6. Informative References
[HTTP2-788]
"Update the HPACK static table", November 2020,
<https://github.com/httpwg/http2-spec/issues/788>.
[HTTPWG-COMMENT]
Thomson, M., "draft-bishop-httpbis-extended-settings-00
comments", 13 July 2016,
<https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-
wg/2016JulSep/0127.html>.
[I-D.bishop-httpbis-extended-settings]
Bishop, M., "HTTP/2 Extended SETTINGS Extension", Work in
Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-bishop-httpbis-extended-
settings-01, 15 November 2016, <http://www.ietf.org/
internet-drafts/draft-bishop-httpbis-extended-settings-
01.txt>.
[I-D.davidben-http-client-hint-reliability]
Benjamin, D., "Client Hint Reliability", Work in Progress,
Internet-Draft, draft-davidben-http-client-hint-
reliability-02, 30 November 2020, <http://www.ietf.org/
internet-drafts/draft-davidben-http-client-hint-
reliability-02.txt>.
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[I-D.ietf-quic-http]
Bishop, M., "Hypertext Transfer Protocol Version 3
(HTTP/3)", Work in Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-
quic-http-32, 20 October 2020, <http://www.ietf.org/
internet-drafts/draft-ietf-quic-http-32.txt>.
[I-D.vvv-httpbis-alps]
Vasiliev, V., "Using TLS Application-Layer Protocol
Settings (ALPS) in HTTP", Work in Progress, Internet-
Draft, draft-vvv-httpbis-alps-00, 6 July 2020,
<http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-vvv-httpbis-
alps-00.txt>.
[I-D.vvv-tls-alps]
Benjamin, D. and V. Vasiliev, "TLS Application-Layer
Protocol Settings Extension", Work in Progress, Internet-
Draft, draft-vvv-tls-alps-01, 21 September 2020,
<http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-vvv-tls-alps-
01.txt>.
[QUIC-2790]
Thomson, M., "Binding settings into session tickets", July
2019, <https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/issues/2790>.
[QUIC-2945]
Oku, K., "When to send the SETTINGS frame", July 2019,
<https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/issues/2945>.
[QUIC-2972]
Bishop, M., "Send complete SETTINGS", August 2019,
<https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/pull/2972>.
[QUIC-3086-COMMENT]
Bishop, M., "Add application parameters to QUIC handshake
and use it for H3 SETTINGS (comment)", 17 October 2019,
<https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/
issues/3086#issuecomment-543373506>.
[QUIC-3622]
"Make using static table and Huffman encoding in QPACK
opt-in", May 2020,
<https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/issues/3622>.
[QUIC-436] Rescorla, E., "Move SETTINGS into TLS Handshake", April
2017, <https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/issues/436>.
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[RFC7301] Friedl, S., Popov, A., Langley, A., and E. Stephan,
"Transport Layer Security (TLS) Application-Layer Protocol
Negotiation Extension", RFC 7301, DOI 10.17487/RFC7301,
July 2014, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7301>.
[RFC7540] Belshe, M., Peon, R., and M. Thomson, Ed., "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2)", RFC 7540,
DOI 10.17487/RFC7540, May 2015,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7540>.
[RFC8446] Rescorla, E., "The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol
Version 1.3", RFC 8446, DOI 10.17487/RFC8446, August 2018,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8446>.
[RFC8470] Thomson, M., Nottingham, M., and W. Tarreau, "Using Early
Data in HTTP", RFC 8470, DOI 10.17487/RFC8470, September
2018, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8470>.
[TCP-TLS] Benjamin, D., "TLS 1.3 and TCP interactions", 29 May 2020,
<https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/
hymweZ66b2C8nnYyXF8cwj7qopc/>.
Acknowledgments
This document has benefited from contributions and suggestions from
Victor Vasiliev.
Author's Address
David Benjamin
Google LLC
Email: davidben@google.com
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