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What sort of message integrity are we concerned about? #726

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martinthomson opened this issue Feb 1, 2021 · 0 comments · Fixed by #735
Closed

What sort of message integrity are we concerned about? #726

martinthomson opened this issue Feb 1, 2021 · 0 comments · Fixed by #735
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editorial h1-messaging

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@martinthomson
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Section 11.3 talks about message integrity in general terms. The introductory sentence is good, but it then seemingly intermingles several different factors that might be relevant:

  1. Accidental corruption of messages in the network. This is not something that applies to HTTPS, but it is relevant for the cleartext variant.
  2. The use of intermediaries that might not be trusted not to modify messages. Noting here that this is likely selective as intermediaries need to modify certain parts of messages.
  3. Attacks on the protocol, which break down further:
    a. Attacks on cleartext HTTP, which has no real defense.
    b. Attacks on TLS, which has good defenses on the whole, though less so with respect to truncation of responses. This is due to the way that HTTP/1.1 allows connection termination (which is under attacker influence) to end a response and the way that TLS in practice is really poor at propagating close_notify in a way that is distinguishable from TCP closure.

Overall, I think that this text could be made clearer.
martinthomson added a commit to martinthomson/http-core that referenced this issue Feb 2, 2021
@martinthomson
Attempt a rewrite of message integrity text
7f7d613 
I didn't want to make this too disruptive, so I concentrated on the high
points.  Related to the changes in httpwg#734.

Breakdown:
 - integrity is important (existing text)
 - HTTPS provides integrity, but you have to be careful with truncation
   (includes existing example)
 - HTTP provides no integrity
 - extensions can be used to provide additional protection, including
   managing the risk of intermediaries messing around (massaging existing
   text)

Closes httpwg#726.
@martinthomson martinthomson mentioned this issue Feb 2, 2021
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Attempt a rewrite of message integrity text martinthomson/http-core
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@martinthomson @mnot @reschke