Re: applying AES-GCM to secure shell: proposed "tweak"

[Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz@cmu.edu>]

--On Thursday, April 09, 2009 11:17:08 PM -0500 Nicolas Williams 
<Nicolas.Williams@sun.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 09, 2009 at 11:42:55AM -0400, Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
> > No, I think the right thing is for the SSH_MSG_OPTION message itself to
> > be  permitted at any time, and leave it to the definitions of individual
> > options to specify when an option may be negotiated and when the results
> > of  that negotiation take effect.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > With regard to the negotiation itself, I think it might be cleaner to
> > have  three separate messages:
>
> Surely you jest.  Why get so complicated when the much simpler
> negotiation through alg names will do?  What value is there in this
> complication?

- generality
- allowing the feature to be negotiated for any algorithm, not just
 a particular gcm algorithm, without a cross product explosion

-- Jeff