Thursday, October 22, 2015

On hitting nails with a microscope

The newly presented RFC introduces probably the most contradictory extension, and by itself is the one of the most meaningless RFCs adopted in the last 20 years.

The address of the RFC is https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7685.txt and it defines the padding extension, whose only function is to insert some zero bytes into the ClientHello packet of the TLS protocol. What's the purpose, you might ask? The purpose is to work around the bugs in some implementation(s) that is/are confused by certain lengths of ClientHellow packet.

You've got it right. Instead of fixing bugs (or pushing the developers to fix bugs) they invent extensions to make other developers complicate their software with those extensions to work around the bugs.

Tolerance is acceptable to people of different race/origin/group. Tolerance to bugs in unacceptable. Tolerance to idiocy is not acceptable either.

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