Thanks David, understood.

It sounds that it would be easier to switch away from RSA to avoid the extra 
complications of batching, but I understand that is not always possible. Given 
that this is an Experimental draft, I am ok with the WG adopting it, given that 
it has merit for some vendors’ usecases.



From: David Benjamin <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2019 7:27 PM
To: Panos Kampanakis (pkampana) <[email protected]>
Cc: Sean Turner <[email protected]>; TLS List <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [TLS] Adoption call for draft-davidben-tls-batch-signing

Deployments whose long-term private key is an ECDSA or EdDSA key stored in 
memory probably have no particular need for this, no. Such deployments probably 
see a signature cost comparable to the ECDH cost this document does not 
amortise. The existing signature algorithms are sufficient and no one's 
proposing removing them.

However, there are many deployments where that is not the case. Hosting 
providers often get their certificates and keys from customers, who may just 
upload an RSA key. RSA keys are expensive enough to be the target of DoS 
attacks. Beyond that, long-term credentials are very sensitive and, yes, there 
are deployments that RPC to a remote location or even use hardware modules. Due 
to performance, I doubt the hardware module is common for server keys, but this 
draft can apply in both directions. We've seen client certificate deployments 
that do this and hit performance problems when the hardware cannot even keep up 
with client connection loads. Batch signing is aimed at these kinds of 
scenarios.

You're right that peers need to be updated, but unupgraded peers do not block 
results. Load decreases as peers adopt this and DoS mitigations often involve 
selectively serving and dropping requests based on factors such as cost. This 
decreases the cost of a class of requests, which allows signers under load to 
serve more of them.

For my part in the client space, we are interested in implementing this in 
BoringSSL and Chrome.

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 12:40 AM Panos Kampanakis (pkampana) 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I am not in favor of adoption, but I could be convinced otherwise.

Sorry as this may have been discussed in IETF-106, but are we that worried 
about the CPU cost of ECDSA or EdDSA that we are willing to have the server 
buffer/slow down client connections, generate the Merkle tree and the batch 
signature? Do we really pull the private key from a hardware module or remote 
location with every signature instead of keeping it in volatile memory in our 
application?

I find it hard to buy the problem statement based on the usecases I know of, 
and such a draft would require a lot of client upgrades and participation in 
order to have fruitful results. I am ready to buy the argument, if there is 
concrete data on actual usecases.

Rgs,
Panos



-----Original Message-----
From: TLS <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> On Behalf Of Sean 
Turner
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2019 1:57 AM
To: TLS List <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Subject: [TLS] Adoption call for draft-davidben-tls-batch-signing

At IETF 106 there was support for adoption of "Batch Signing for TLS" [0] as a 
WG item.  To confirm this on the list: if you believe that the TLS WG should 
not adopt this as a WG item, then please let the chairs know by posting a 
message to the TLS list by 2359 UTC 13 December 2019 (and say why).

NOTE:
: If the consensus is that this draft should be adopted as a WG item, then this 
will necessarily result in a WG rechartering discussions.  We would have gotten 
to this rechartering discussion anyway now that DTLS 1.3 is progressing out of 
the WG.

Thanks,
Chris, Joe, and Sean

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-davidben-tls-batch-signing/
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