Re: [TLS] TLS 1.2 and CertificateRequest message

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav at gnutls.org>]

Michael D'Errico wrote:
> I remember participating in the discussion that led to this design.  I
> argued that since we added a signature algorithms extension to allow
> negotiation of the client's preferred algorithms, it made the most
> sense to make the extension symmetric so the server could notify the
> client of its preferred algorithms in its hello message as well.
> 
> There was opposition to my argument, that the list of algorithms belongs
> where it is needed, in the certificate request message.  The term
> "locality of reference" was thrown around as a justification.  Not being
> an official member of the working group, and since nobody else seemed to
> prefer my idea, I forfeited the point.

I believe you were correct then and this is really a drawback of TLS 1.2
comparing to TLS 1.x, x<2. My main concern is that it requires totally
different handling of handshake hashes, thus increasing code complexity
(and memory usage).

regards,
Nikos