On 3/30/18 at 7:35 PM, pgut...@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) wrote:

As you mention, debugging TLS is unnecessarily painful if there's a problem,
you typically just get a handshake-failed alert which is essentially no
information at all.  Having a debug-mode capability to send back a long-form
error message would be extremely useful, maybe an extension to say "send back
a long-form alert with more than just 'BOOLEAN succeeded = FALSE' in it".

We have always avoided the long form error messages in TLS because they can be of great help to attackers as well as debuggers. I think this objection is much weaker if we write the long form error messages into a log that is kept with other server logs.

Cheers - Bill

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