Subject: [ietf-tls] Re: London

From: Bodo Moeller <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 15:29:05 +0200

On Wed, Jul 04, 2001 at 07:50:53PM -0800, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> There's a difference between jumping between what are perceived as two
> different protocols (even though they're similar) and jumping versions
> (especially away from 1.0). Yes, this is just a perception thing, but that's
> part of what versioning is about.
> 
> Also, I'm concerned about user identification of the capabilities of a
> browser or other product; I'm not too optimistic about MS or anyone else
> clearly labeling their product as "TLS plus extensions foo, bar and baz";
> while they'll be more apt to state "TLS 1.1" once they're compliant.

The extensions are mostly optional -- the client is not obliged to
generate them, and the server can ignore them except that it must
abort the handshake if server_hello_extension_list does not parse
correctly.  So "TLS 1.1 compliancy" wouldn't mean a lot.

Internal version numbers, such as { 3, 1 } for TLS 1.0, are important
for protocol negotiation.  There is no need to use anything other than
{ 3, 1 } for using TLS extensions as proposed in
draft-ietf-tls-extensions-00.txt.  Of course we could declare that
{ 3, 1 } denotes both TLS 1.0 (if used without extensions) and TLS 1.1
(if used with extensions), but I think this is pointless.

Using a new internal version number such as { 3, 2 } would make things
unnecessarily complicated.  There is no need to increment the version
number unless we are doing incompatible changes.

-- 
Bodo Möller <[email-masked]>
PGP http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/TI/Mitarbeiter/moeller/0x36d2c658.html
* TU Darmstadt, Theoretische Informatik, Alexanderstr. 10, D-64283 Darmstadt
* Tel. +49-6151-16-6628, Fax +49-6151-16-6036

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