Managing and removing automatic version rollback in TLS Clients
draft-pettersen-tls-version-rollback-removal-02

Network Working Group                                       Y. Pettersen
Internet-Draft
Intended status: Informational                           August 22, 2013
Expires: February 23, 2014

    Managing and removing automatic version rollback in TLS Clients
            draft-pettersen-tls-version-rollback-removal-02

Abstract

   Ever since vendors started deploying TLS 1.0 clients, these clients
   have had to handle server implementations that do not tolerate the
   TLS version supported by the client, usually by automatically
   signaling an older supported version instead.  Such version rollbacks
   represent a potential security hazard, if the older version should
   become vulnerable to attacks.  The same history repeated when TLS
   Extensions were introduced, as some servers would not negotiate with
   clients that sent these protocol extensions, forcing clients to
   reduce protocol functionality in order to maintain interoperability.

   This document outlines a procedure to help clients decide when they
   may use version rollback to maintain interoperability with legacy
   servers, under what conditions the clients should not allow version
   rollbacks, such as when the server has indicated support for the TLS
   Renegotiation Information extension.  The intention of this procedure
   is to limit the use of automatic version rollback to legacy servers
   and eventually eliminate its use.

Status of This Memo

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

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on February 23, 2014.

Copyright Notice

Pettersen               Expires February 23, 2014               [Page 1]
Internet-Draft         Version rollback management           August 2013

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

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

1.  Introduction

   When vendors of Transport Layer Security (TLS) clients intially
   developed and released TLS 1.0 [RFC2246] clients, they quickly
   discovered that not all Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) v3 [RFC6101]
   servers were willing to accept or complete handshakes with the TLS
   clients.  The reasons for this varied across various server
   implementations, such as not accepting versions higher than SSL v3,
   and various errors in the implementation of the handshake, e.g.,
   expecting the RSA Premaster Secret's version field to match the
   selected version, not the signaled version.

   Given the scope of the problem of getting servers fixed, in order to
   provide a good user experience for their customers, vendors elected
   instead to restart the connection and signal the older protocol
   version as the highest supported version in such cases.

   This process was repeated when TLS Extensions[RFC6066], TLS 1.1
   [RFC4346] and TLS 1.2 [RFC5246] were introduced, as clients had to
   disable these features to be able to connect with servers that did
   not tolerate them.

   As a consequence, clients are not just vulnerable to a version
   rollback attack; in the event that a vulnerability in older protocol
   versions should be discovered, they are intentionally designed to be
   vulnerable to such attacks by automatically performing a version
   rollback whenever something goes wrong with the current TLS
   handshake.

   While it would be preferable that clients do not perform version
   rollbacks, it is presently not practical to forbid it entirely, but
   there are ways to limit the use of rollbacks, and eventually phase
   out the usage completely.

Pettersen               Expires February 23, 2014               [Page 2]
Internet-Draft         Version rollback management           August 2013

   This document presents a procedure for selecting when to allow a
   version rollback and how to implement it, in order to maintain
   interoperability with legacy servers, as well as when to not allow
   version rollbacks.

   The main factor for deciding not to allow version rollbacks is
   whether the server supports the TLS Renegotiation Information
   Extension[RFC5746].  [RFC5746] specifically reminds implementors that
   servers MUST correctly handle clients that support TLS Extensions and
   /or new TLS versions than supported by the server.  For the most
   part, server vendors have adhered to this, as (per July 2012) less
   than 0.14% of servers with Renegotiation Information extension
   support (70.6%) do not adhere to this requirement, compared to 4.5%
   among servers that does not support this extension.

1.1.  Requirements Language

   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 [RFC2119].

2.  Managing Version Rollbacks

   When a TLS client initially connects to a TLS server, it exchanges a
   number messages with the server in order to establish the encrypted
   connection:

   o  Sending the Client Hello, which identifies the client's higest
      supported version, supported extensions, and cryptographic
      parameters

   o  Receiving the Server Hello, which identifies the server's selected
      version, supported extensions, cryptographic paramaters

   o  Exchange of more messages to negotiate the encryption keys, and
      other parameters

   o  Each sends a Finished message to the other, showing that the
      negotiation succeeded, after which the secure connection is active

   Each step of this negotiation sequence can fail for various reasons,
   until the Finished messages have been sent and verified.  The
   failures can be indicated with Alert codes or by just shutting down
   the connection.  Frequently, many of these failures are due to
   incorrect implementation on either end.

   This tendency toward implementation issues leading to connection
   failures have caused most client vendors to adopt a policy of

Pettersen               Expires February 23, 2014               [Page 3]
Internet-Draft         Version rollback management           August 2013

   retrying with older versions of the protocol, in case the failure was
   caused by version-specific problems in the server.

2.1.  Version Rollback Sequence

   When establishing a TLS connection to a server with unknown
   capabilities, a client SHOULD use the following sequence, advancing
   to the next step if the connection attempt fails.

   1.  If the client supports TLS 1.1 or higher, it SHOULD send a Client
       Hello indicating this highest version and include all supported
       extensions.  The version of the Record Protocol SHOULD at most be
       TLS 1.0

   2.  If step 1 failed, and the server either did not indicate a
       supported version or this version was TLS 1.0 or below, send a
       Client Hello indicating TLS 1.0 as the highest version and
       include all supported extensions.  If this fails, the client MAY
       remove extensions in a separate connection attempt before
       considering this step to have failed.

   3.  If step 2 failed, and the server either did not indicate a
       supported version or this version was SSL v3, send a Client Hello
       indicating SSL v3 as the highest version, without sending TLS
       Extensions.

   In each step, the client MUST indicate support for the TLS
   Renegotiation Information Extension, using the
   TLS_EMPTY_RENEGOTIATION_INFO_SCSV cipher suite value specified by
   [RFC5746] if TLS Extensions are not sent in the Client Hello.

   The client MUST NOT roll back to an older version than the server has
   indicated, even if the connection handshake failed.  That is, if the
   server indicates support for TLS 1.1, but the connection fails, then
   the client MUST NOT attempt to connect to the server using TLS 1.0,
   but allow the connection to fail.

2.2.  Version Recovery

   Once a connection is established and the client has received the
   Server Hello, it MUST check the response to determine if the server
   sends the TLS Renegotiation Information (RI) extension, and then
   decide how to proceed:

   o  If the server did not return the RI extension, the client can
      continue the handshake as normal and MAY continue version
      rollbacks as described in Section 2.1 if the connection fails.

Pettersen               Expires February 23, 2014               [Page 4]
Internet-Draft         Version rollback management           August 2013

   o  If the server did return the RI extension, and the client
      indicated its highest supported version, with extensions, (first
      step in Section 2.1) in the Client Hello, the client can continue
      the handshake as normal but MUST NOT permit version rollbacks, in
      case the connection fails, but instead allow the connection to
      fail.

   o  If the server did return the RI extension, but the client was
      indicating an older TLS version as its highest supported version,
      or without TLS Extensions, the client MUST terminate the
      connection, reestablish it, and send a Client Hello that signals
      the highest supported version, and includes extensions, and it
      MUST NOT permit a failure to trigger a new version rollback
      sequence, but instead end the attempt to establish the connection.

   The reason for not allowing version rollbacks if the server supports
   the RI extension is that such servers MUST accept that clients
   indicate a higher supported version than they do, and they MUST
   support or tolerate clients that send TLS Extensions.  It must be
   presumed that, if such a handshake fails, it is because the
   connection is being subjected to a active version downgrade attack,
   not that the server has been incorrectly implemented in this respect.

3.  IANA Considerations

   This document makes no request of IANA.

   Note to RFC Editor: this section may be removed on publication as an
   RFC.

4.  Security Considerations

   Allowing automatic version rollbacks exposes the TLS connection
   between the client and server to significant risk if the older
   version that gets negotiated is vulnerable to an attack that allows
   the transmitted information to leak.

   The use of automatic version rollbacks should be limited to
   connections to servers that require it for interoperability reasons
   and be prohibited for any other servers.  While it is impractial to
   discover which servers truly need such consideration, this document
   specifies the presence of the TLS Renegotiation Information extension
   as a proxy indication that the server does not require such
   interoperability considerations.

5.  Acknowledgements

Pettersen               Expires February 23, 2014               [Page 5]
Internet-Draft         Version rollback management           August 2013

6.  References

6.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [RFC5246]  Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
              (TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246, August 2008.

   [RFC5746]  Rescorla, E., Ray, M., Dispensa, S., and N. Oskov,
              "Transport Layer Security (TLS) Renegotiation Indication
              Extension", RFC 5746, February 2010.

   [RFC6066]  Eastlake, D., "Transport Layer Security (TLS) Extensions:
              Extension Definitions", RFC 6066, January 2011.

   [RFC6101]  Freier, A., Karlton, P., and P. Kocher, "The Secure
              Sockets Layer (SSL) Protocol Version 3.0", RFC 6101,
              August 2011.

6.2.  Informative References

   [RFC2246]  Dierks, T. and C. Allen, "The TLS Protocol Version 1.0",
              RFC 2246, January 1999.

   [RFC4346]  Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
              (TLS) Protocol Version 1.1", RFC 4346, April 2006.

Author's Address

   Yngve N. Pettersen

   Email: yngve@spec-work.net

Pettersen               Expires February 23, 2014               [Page 6]