Summary
Sean Turner is the DS.
Ben Kaduk is the responsible AD.
The GREASE (Generate Random Extensions And Sustain
Extensibility) mechanism is intended to prevent extensibility
failures in the TLS ecosystem. This document reserves some
currently unused values for TLS implementations to advertise
at random. Correctly implemented peers will ignore these
values and interoperate. Peers that do not tolerate unknown
values will fail to interoperate, revealing the mistake before it
is widespread.
The intended status is Informational, which is sufficient to
assign the code points in the TLS registries. Technically, after
the publication of RFC 8447 this draft does not need to be
published as an RFC to perform these code point assignments
but because GREASE was successfully used to uncover
extensibility failures in the TLS ecosystems, other protocols
could benefit from the same mechanism, and we hear it is
easy to publish RFCs we figured we exercise the process
to get this draft published.
AD NOTE: Note that this has been successfully deployed for
over a year; it's not really an "experiment" anymore but rather
a useful thing that people do, both in TLS and elsewhere. This
is informational in the sense that "here is a thing you can do,
and some information about why you might want to do it". There's
no real protocol -- you send some codepoints and expect the other
endpoint to not change behavior as a result -- so it doesn't make sense
as a proposed standard. I suppose one could argue that it is a BCP
since it is for the health of the ecosystem, but that does not really
feel like a good match. So to me, Informational is the right status.
Review and Consensus
David presented the draft multiple times to the WG. He has
also presented the concept elsewhere; this happen to be my
favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mE_JmwFi1Y
The concept is well understood and was reviewed and adopted
by the WG. But, there's not much to the draft so there was no
controversy (thankfully).
The draft's timeline is quite long but that is primarily because of
the WG chairs as well as the slow progress of RFC 8447, which allowed
an informational draft to do the assigments.
Intellectual Property
The DS confirmed with the author that any IPR related to
this document has already been disclosed, in conformance
with BCPs 78 and 79.
Other Considerations
There are DOWNREFS in this draft.
This entire document is one beig IANA consideration.
The DS did consult IANA about GREASE and their
suggestion was to check with the Registry DEs. The DS
consulted with the DEs and they gave the thumbs up!
GREASE is implemented by Chrome.