This seems like a truly unreasonable level of political skill for nearly any setting. We're talking about changing every endpoint in the Internet, including those which can no longer be upgraded. I struggle to think of any entity or set of entities which could plausibly do that.
Moreover, even in the best case scenario this means that you don't get the benefits of deployment for years if not decades. Even 7 years out, TLS 1.3 is well below 100% deployment. To take a specific example here: we want to deploy PQ ciphers ASAP to prevent harvest-and-decrypt attacks. Why should this wait for 100% deployment?
> The big downside of negotiation is that no one ever has to commit to anything so everything is possible. In the case of TLS, that seems to have led to endless bikeshedding which has created a standard which has so many options is is hardly a standard anymore. The only part that has to be truly standard is the negotiation scheme.
I don't think this is really that accurate, especially on the Web. The actual widely in use options are fairly narrow.
TLS is used in a lot of different settings, so it's unsurprising that there are a lot of options to cover those settings. TLS 1.3 did manage to reduce those quite a bit, however.
> This seems like a truly unreasonable level of political skill for nearly any setting. We're talking about changing every endpoint in the Internet, including those which can no longer be upgraded. I struggle to think of any entity or set of entities which could plausibly do that.
Case in point: IPv6 adoption. There's no interoperability or negotiation between it and IPv4 (at least, not in any way that matters), which has led to the mess we're in today.
That’s not negotiating- I can’t connect to a server over v4 and have it tell me to switch to v6 or vice versa. That’s just supporting 2 completely different protocols.
Right. The closest thing we have to IPv6 "negotiation" is the Happy Eyeballs algorithm[0], which is literally just "connect to both at the same time and pick the one that connects first". The name serves to legitimise it and make it sound fancy but it's basically just brute force + a bit of caching.
Moreover, even in the best case scenario this means that you don't get the benefits of deployment for years if not decades. Even 7 years out, TLS 1.3 is well below 100% deployment. To take a specific example here: we want to deploy PQ ciphers ASAP to prevent harvest-and-decrypt attacks. Why should this wait for 100% deployment?
> The big downside of negotiation is that no one ever has to commit to anything so everything is possible. In the case of TLS, that seems to have led to endless bikeshedding which has created a standard which has so many options is is hardly a standard anymore. The only part that has to be truly standard is the negotiation scheme.
I don't think this is really that accurate, especially on the Web. The actual widely in use options are fairly narrow.
TLS is used in a lot of different settings, so it's unsurprising that there are a lot of options to cover those settings. TLS 1.3 did manage to reduce those quite a bit, however.