Subject: [TLS] Protocol Action: 'TLS Ticket Requests' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-tls-ticketrequests-07.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Feb 2021 08:30:56 -0800

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'TLS Ticket Requests'
  (draft-ietf-tls-ticketrequests-07.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Transport Layer Security Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Benjamin Kaduk and Roman Danyliw.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-ticketrequests/

Technical Summary

This document defines a TLS extension that clients can use to inform servers
about the desired number of tickets to generate, in order to reduce ticket waste
while simultaneously letting clients prepare for future connection attempts.

Working Group Summary

The draft had a fairly quiet existence until the -02 version, which was 
also the version where the authors requested the chairs request WGLC.
The WGLC and two issue-specific consensus calls that followed were all
fairly contentious.  The WGLC and the two issue-specific consensus calls
resulted in changes to the draft: the count field was renamed
new_session_count, a new counter called resumption_count was added, and 
text was added to address racing pre-conditions.  The addition of the
second counter acknowledged that resumption is different and can
tolerate the complexity of the additional counter. What was not added
was text to address ticket reuse use cases; RFC 8446 indicates "clients
SHOULD NOT reuse a ticket for multiple connections". One of the
issue-specific consensus calls about this was about this point and there
was no consensus to add text to address this use case.

The consensus should probably be characterized as rough. This is because
it seems that that the same people that supported adopting the draft
support publishing the mechanism, but there are differences in how far
participants believe the mechanism should go in supporting ticket reuse.

Document Quality

Due to the controversial nature of the discussion of ticket reuse,
essentially all the text in this document received careful review from
many WG participants.  It should be of high quality, though to my
knowledge implementors wanted to wait until the controversy was
settled (i.e., by publication) before implementing.

Personnel

Sean Turner is the Shepherd.
Ben Kaduk is the Area Director.

RFC Editor Note

  Please ensure that the current (RFC 8174) form of BCP 14 boilerplate is used.