Credential Protection Ciphersuites for Transport Layer Security (TLS)
draft-hajjeh-tls-identity-protection-09

[Ballot comment]
At the end of Section 1...

  The reader is expected to become familiar with the TLS standards
  ([RFC5246] and, if needed, [RFC4346] and [RFC2246] for its
  predecessors) prior to studying this document.

Well, is it needed to become familiar with RFC 4346 and RFC 2246?

---

As with all Experimental RCs, I would have liked to see some description of the experimental parameters; how the experiment is to be set up, kept isolated, and evaluated.

This RFC-to-be was submitted to the RFC Editor to be published as
Experimental: draft-hajjeh-tls-identity-protection-05.txt

Please let us know if this document conflicts with the IETF standards
process or other work being done in the IETF community.

Four week timeout expires on 23 September 2008.


Credential Protection Ciphersuites for Transport Layer Security (TLS)

The Transport Layer Security (TLS) supports three authentication
modes: authentication of both parties, server authentication with
an unauthenticated client, and total anonymity. For each mode, TLS
specifies a set of cipher suites. Whenever the server is
authenticated, the channel is secure against man-in-the-middle
attacks, but completely anonymous sessions are inherently
vulnerable to such attacks.

The authentication is usually based on either preshared keys or
public key certificates. If a public key certificate is used to
authenticate the TLS client during the TLS Handshake, the TLS
client credentials are sent in clear text over the wire. Thus, any
observer can determine the credentials used by the client, learn
who is reaching the network, when, and from where, and hence
correlate the client credentials to the connection location.

This document defines a set of cipher suites to add client
credential protection to the TLS protocol. This is useful
especially if TLS is used in wireless environments or to secure
remote access. By negotiating one of the ciphersuites described in
this document, the TLS clients will be able to determine for
themselves when, how, to what extent and for what purpose
information about them is communicated to others.