mbed-tls January 2021

mbed-tls@lists.trustedfirmware.org

7 participants
12 discussions

Add support to delegate cert verification to application

by Junqi Wang

Hi, Hanno suggested me to post our discussion here: We use mbedtls in Facebook family apps. One of missing features is the ability to delegate cert verification to application. Hanno has pointed us to a similar ask in https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbedtls/pull/2091 We implemented cert verification process in Android/java and iOS/objective-C. Having this feature enables us to use the OS module for cert verification. The motivation is reduced maintenance cost. Some mobile APPs use OS TLS stack (rather than bundle mbedtls or openssl in the binary), so we have to maintain our OS-specific cert verification modules anyways. It’ll be ideal if we only keep the Android and iOS implementations as source of truth. Any thoughts on supporting this? Thanks, Junqi

3 years, 3 months

DTLS Connection-ID update - potential issue for large-scale deployments

by Manuel Pegourie-Gonnard

Hi all, Back in June 2019, we added support for the experimental DTLS Connection ID extension in Mbed TLS 2.18.0. This extension makes it possible to keep a connection alive even when the client's connectivity changes (eg new IP address). Since this was based on a draft rather than an established standard, it is disabled in the default config, and the option to enable it comes with a warning about us not being able to make any stability promises. As it turns out, a couple of months ago an extension number was assigned by IANA for this extension, which is different from the one we picked up when implementing the draft, so we'll have to change that in a future version of Mbed TLS. This change is trivial to do but would break compatibility in the following sense: and old client and a new server (or a new client and a new server) would no longer be able to negotiate this extension; only old-old and new-new would work. (Thanks to Achim Kraus for bringing that to our attention by the way: https://github.com/ARMmbed/mbedtls/issues/3892 ) One obvious solution to that issue would be to make sure all users upgrade all the clients and the servers at the same time. This can probably be managed in a development/testing environment as well as some tightly controlled production environments, but is probably less suitable for large-scale deployments where clients and servers might not even be manged by the same party. So, before we plan this changed, we'll like to know if anyone already has a production deployment relying on Connection ID where updating all the clients and servers at the same time would not be an option. If that is the case, we may consider implementing a compatibility mode that would allow a server to negotiate use of the extension with both old and new clients. However, such compatibility code would be non-standard and a testing burden (not to mention, significantly more work that just updating the relevant #define), so that's something we'd like to avoid doing unless we know that there is an actual need for it. Please let us know what you think by replying to this email either on-list, or privately if you'd rather not share deployment information publicly (in that case, please mention it explicitly so that we know you didn't just forget to Cc the list). Thanks, Manuel

3 years, 3 months

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mbed-tls January 2021