Hi Brian,

  *   Look at Windows Server 2012 and similar legacy products that are in 
widespread use, which don't support any PFS cipher suites except FFDHE.
Windows Server 2012/Windows 8 support both TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA and TLS_ECDHE_RSA 
cipher suites: TLS Cipher Suites in Windows 8 - Win32 apps | Microsoft 
Docs<https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/secauthn/tls-cipher-suites-in-windows-8>

Our telemetry shows extremely low usage of TLS_DHE cipher suites and I’m in 
favor of deprecating them.

Cheers,

Andrei

From: TLS <tls-boun...@ietf.org> On Behalf Of Brian Smith
Sent: Monday, March 8, 2021 4:13 PM
To: Martin Thomson <m...@lowentropy.net>
Cc: <tls@ietf.org> <tls@ietf.org>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [TLS] Regarding draft-bartle-tls-deprecate-ffdhe

It is sad that nobody is willing to discuss the obvious downsides of this 
proposal as written, which should at least be mentioned in the security 
considerations. Without discussing the downsides we're reducing engineering to 
politics. If we discuss the downsides then we can substantially improve the 
proposal.

Deprecating FFDHE key exchange without deprecating RSA key exchange will 
substantially increase the usage of RSA key exchange and thus make server key 
compromise more dangerous. At a minimum, RSA key exchange should be deprecated 
at the same time, in the same document.

Look at Windows Server 2012 and similar legacy products that are in widespread 
use, which don't support any PFS cipher suites except FFDHE. Please deprecate 
RSA key exchange at the same time so that there is enough motivation for 
vendors of these legacy products to add safe alternatives and/or for users of 
these legacy implementations to upgrade to something new that implements a safe 
alternative. (Note that Windows Server 2012 did add a patch to enable 
increasing its FFDHE key size to safe sizes.)

It would be useful for the browser vendors that recently dropped FFDHE support 
to share their measurements for how much RSA key exchange usage increased after 
their changes. That would help us quantify the real-world impact of this change.

RSA key exchange uses flawed and error-prone cryptography that is prone to side 
channels as well, PKCS#1 encryption/decryption. Previous studies have found 
widespread flaws in implementations that are (AFAICT) even more easily 
exploitable than the Racoon attack is.

It is easy to imagine a perfect implementation of RSA key exchange that also 
perfectly protects the server's private key. It is unrealistic to expect 
implementations to actually live up to that ideal. When RSA key exchange is 
used, then a government that can effectively undo all the past encryption of a 
server if it can force the server operator to disclose the key, even for a 
perfect implementation of RSA key exchange.

Deprecating RSA key exchange at the same time as FFDHE will encourage adoption 
of newer products that also often support TLS 1.3.

Without creating a new, correct, way to use FFDHE key exchange, we're left with 
elliptic curve (ECDHE) key exchange as the only reasonable and 
widely-implemented key exchange mechanism.

Cheers,
Brian
(Speaking only for myself)
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