Re: Banning TLS renegotiation

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Tue, Oct 03, 2017 at 11:32:56AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> I implemented TLS support in nbdkit last week.
> 
> As part of this I came across an unusual corner of the TLS protocol
> called ‘renegotiation’, where — in mid-stream — either peer can
> request at the TLS level that the TLS handshake is performed again.
> 
> I found a good explanation of why you might want to do this in the
> context of web servers here:
> 
>   https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/24554/should-i-use-ssl-tls-renegotiation/24569#24569
> 
> I don't think there is any case where NBD can renegotiate the
> exportname mid-stream, so this does not apply to NBD.
> 
> either qemu (client or server) nor nbdkit (server) implement this.  I
> didn't check other implementations in detail, but I would note that
> with GnuTLS renegotiation is *not* handled transparently.  What
> happens is that any call to gnutls_record_recv can return
> GNUTLS_E_REHANDSHAKE and the peer must decide either to perform the
> handshake (calling gnutls_rehandshake[1]) or to drop the connection.
> So doing this would complicate the implementation of NBD clients and
> servers.
> 
> As this feature is not needed, I think the NBD protocol doc should
> explicitly ban it, or at least say that conforming servers and clients
> are allowed to immediately terminate peers which try to perform
> renegotiation.

In TLS any client or server supporting renegotiation already has to
deal with fact that their peer might reject the request to renegotiate. 
There is defined behaviour for TLS / GNUTLS about how to reject such a
request in a graceful manner.

So I think defining that the peer is allowed to terminate the connection
is not required or desirable from NBD POV

At most I would think that we could say

  "NBD servers and clients should not assume that the peer will
   support TLS renegotiation"

if they wish to try renegotiation anyway, leave it upto the TLS library
and app code as to what happens upon rejection.

Regards,
Daniel
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