Response to GnuTLS in Exim Debate

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Marc Haber blogs about GnuTLS in Exim4, and it suggests there is a long list of technical issues in GnuTLS. Given my involvement in GnuTLS, I decided to analyze each bug to see what we can learn and possibly improve.

I looked at the all bugs tagged with gnutls in the exim4 bug tracker. My impression is that Marc Haber has done a very good job as Exim4 maintainer in dealing with these GnuTLS related problems. Some of the frustration seems to be because submitters don’t respond to questions. Also it seems different problems are discussed at the same time, which makes it very difficult to help isolate and solve the problem. The only serious problem I’ve identified is the entropy depletion problem, and the GnuTLS team will try to address it. To me, the concern seems more of a volunteer time issue than a technical one.

Quick Summary

Bug #348046 is so complex that I cannot judge it. If the submitters are willing, it may be best to re-submit each problem separately. The problem with TheBat is interesting, but given the non-free status of TheBat and no other reports, it doesn’t seem serious. To reduce entropy consumption is something we should work on, but it is a ‘wishlist’ kind of bug, and to some extent may have already been solved by removing the DH generation code which depleats the entropy pool quickly. The rest appears to be already solved or should be tagged as ‘wontfix’.
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FSCONS

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A free software conference in Sweden? That’s a rare one. Organized by the FSFE and Henrik Sandklef, it will be held on the 7-8 December 2007. I hope we’ll see more of this in Sweden. I’m proud to have been invited to talk about both GnuTLS and OpenID. I’m happy to see that there is a OpenMoko talk as well. If you want to participate, there is an early bird discount if you register now. If someone is going and would like to chat, drop me an email.

On TLS-AUTHZ

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The TLS-AUTHZ document (protocol spec here) describes a mechanism to add support for authorization in the TLS protocol. The idea is part of a patent application, see the patent notification to the IETF. The protocol has a complicated history in the IETF. Right now a third last call is open to request feedback from the community. I’ve written about TLS-AUTHZ before.

RedPhoneSecurity is now trying to circumvent the IETF standardization process by trying to get the document published as an ‘experimental standard’. The document earlier failed to get consensus for publication on the standards track.

The responsible IETF Area Director, Tim Polk, argues that because there exists independent implementations, the community benefits from having the document published. The argument is silly because the only independent implementation is mine and I’m opposed to publication of the standard. Further, the document will remain accessible to anyone in the community with access to the Internet since it has been published as an Internet Draft. To clarify that we have no interest in a standard with patent claims, we have decided to remove the tls-authz implementation from GnuTLS. Together with the FSF we came up with the following statement which is part of the GnuTLS 2.0.2 release announcement:

** TLS authorization support removed.
This technique may be patented in the future, and it is not of crucial importance for the Internet community. After deliberation we have concluded that the best thing we can do in this situation is to encourage society not to adopt this technique. We have decided to lead the way with our own actions.

If you are concerned about having patented standards adopted by the IETF, now is a very good time to make your voice heard! The last call ends on October 23th. Please read about the issue, and familiarize yourself with the IETF process (RFC 2026, with updates related to patents in RFC 3989) and send your feedback to ietf@ietf.org.

Home Audio Server

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Procrastinating real work, I documented my home audio server setup. I needed a cross-platform solution, and as a first step, I settled with MPD. The setup is only a few days old, and I may decide to change software eventually. But the current setup works under Gnome, Windows, Mac OS X and even on my Nokia 6233.

Home Audio Server

What may be missing is FM/DAB Radio and streaming of TV, but I’m not sure the little NSLU2 is up to it. We’ll see.

The writeup on how to do this is long, so I put it at a separate page:
http://josefsson.org/grisslan/audio.html

(This is a continuation of my series to document the devices that run my home, the first was the internet setup).

GnuTLS v2.0

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I released GnuTLS v2.0 yesterday, the announcement is available.

So now we can start thinking of nice stuff to have in the v2.1.x series. Integrating the PKCS#11 support is one. ECC support? TLS 1.2 may go into v2.0.x. Opaque PRF input support is planned. Some benchmarking and optimization could be interesting. Other ideas?