Subject: [TLS] rfc4366 and TLS protocol revisions

From: Martin Rex <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 01:01:21 +0200 (MEST)

Dear TLS,

I believe the claim in the header of rfc4366-bis that it obsoletes
rfc4366 is inappropriate and should be changed to "updates 4366".

Btw. rfc-5246 claims to have obsoleted rfc-4366 already, which
is an invalid claim according to the rfc4366bis Introduction.

rfc4366bis _exclusively_ describes TLS extensions for use with
rfc-5246 and is no longer usable with TLSv1.0 and TLSv1.1
because it lacks the description of the two handshake messages
"ExtendedClientHello" and "ExtendedServerHello" that are necessary
for use with TLSv1.0 and TLSv1.1.

Similarly, the notion that rfc-5246.txt (TLSv1.2) would obsolete
and prior versions of TLS is inappropriate and should be changed
to "updates 4346" and the same applies to the TLSv1.1 spec (rfc4346)
which does not obsolete TLSv1.0 for the same reason.

The way the successor TLS specs are designed, they are backwards
incompatible protocols and semantics, requirements and (different) PDUs
of prior versions are _not_ described in rfc-5246, like the
"CertificateRequest" handshake message of TLS version TLSv1.1 and earlier.

In other IETF working groups the terminology was chosen more appropriately,
like rfc-4121 (Kerberos GSS-API mech v2) which does _NOT_ obsolete
rfc-1964 (Kerbero GSS-API mech), and IPv6 which does _NOT_ obsolete IPv4.

While we likely cannot fix the invalid "obsolete" marker in the documents
rfc-4346, rfc-5246 themselves, we should definitely fix it for rfc4366bis
and the document status registry from which rfc-index.txt is created.

-Martin