Update to reflect that TLS1 and TLSv1.1 are now deprecated

On 3/24/21 5:49 AM, Daniel Gustafsson wrote:

The recently published RFC 8996 deprecates the use of TLSv1 and TLSv1.1, the
attached rewords where we say our default of 1.2 is industry best practice with
a link to the authoritative source.

I would s/as of/stated in/ and add a comma after RFC 8996, but otherwise
+1 from me.

Jonathan

On 24.03.21 10:49, Daniel Gustafsson wrote:

The recently published RFC 8996 deprecates the use of TLSv1 and TLSv1.1, the
attached rewords where we say our default of 1.2 is industry best practice with
a link to the authoritative source.

The "industry best practices" the original text refers to are things
like PCI-DSS and various announcements by browser vendors. Those best
practices have already been around for long before RFC 8996. I think
this patch is mangling the two concepts of what is best practice and
what is officially deprecated, and since when each of them applies.

If we want to throw RFC 8996 into the mix, we could drop the reference
to best practices and just write something like

"The default is TLSv1.2. Note that all older versions are deprecated as
of this writing (see RFC 8996)."

However, now that I read this, it's not clear from this who is doing the
deprecating. Someone could wonder, does this mean PostgreSQL will drop
support for it?

Maybe the old wording is best and more timeless, and if someone wants to
question it they can do their own research.

On 24 Mar 2021, at 21:07, Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com> wrote:

On 24.03.21 10:49, Daniel Gustafsson wrote:

The recently published RFC 8996 deprecates the use of TLSv1 and TLSv1.1, the
attached rewords where we say our default of 1.2 is industry best practice with
a link to the authoritative source.

The "industry best practices" the original text refers to are things like PCI-DSS and various announcements by browser vendors. Those best practices have already been around for long before RFC 8996. I think this patch is mangling the two concepts of what is best practice and what is officially deprecated, and since when each of them applies.

Well, since the publishing of RFC 8996 as a BCP document the industry best
practice is to not allow TLSv1.0 or TLSv1.1 at all, so claiming 1.2 as the
default with others available being best practice is concept mangling to some
extent as well.

However, now that I read this, it's not clear from this who is doing the deprecating. Someone could wonder, does this mean PostgreSQL will drop support for it?

OpenSSL and/or distributions are likely to beat us to it, so users may find
their servers unreachable after upgrading OpenSSL because of the protocol no
longer being available. Maybe it's the below wording which should reflect that
all versions of OpenSSL will restrict the available protocols, either because
of age or RFC 8996?

"Older versions of the OpenSSL library do not support all values; an
error will be raised if an unsupported setting is chosen."

--
Daniel Gustafsson https://vmware.com/