Subject: Re: [TLS] TLS 1.3 - Support for compression to be removed

From: Julien ÉLIE <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 29 Nov 2015 21:20:15 +0100

Hi all,

> > If compression is so important to NNTP, they should add first-class
>> support. Period. They should not be relying on a poorly conceived
>> feature which has been repeatedly demonstrated to introduce
>> vulnerabilities in what is supposed to be a *security protocol* just
>> because they don't want to implement compression themselves.
>>
>> An unsafe feature shouldn't be kept in TLS just because some
>> protocols want to do unsafe things and are too lazy to implement
>> their own compression.
>
> [Stephen]
> Compression does have issues clearly, but it's not correct to
> describe people wanting TLS to compress as lazy. They're rather
> looking for the same features that TLS has offered for a couple of
> decades.

The good news is that the "first-class" NNTP compression support will 
soon be a reality.  We've updated the draft of the COMPRESS command, and 
we hope to publish it as an RFC:
     https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-murchison-nntp-compress-02

Interoperability is proven:  both a news client (flnews) and a news 
server (INN) have implemented it.

As far as security is concerned, authentication MUST be done *before* 
activating the compression layer (in other words, AUTHINFO is no longer 
valid after a successful use of COMPRESS).

Thanks again guys for having put us to work on that NNTP extension!

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

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