For those of you not watching the repo Isaac Boukris has a pull request
to add support for TLS-PSK in libcurl for the OpenSSL backend [1]. It
has been open for two months but hasn't received much feedback. If you
are familiar with TLS-PSK or that is a feature you want in libcurl
please give feedback in the pull request or this thread.

I don't use TLS-PSK but I've taken a look at the commit and given my
feedback. I'm hesitant to +1 due to a lack of experience with the PSK
protocols and I don't know how PSK is actually being used in practice.
Specifically I have two reservations:

- What type of keys we'll allow: Currently the key is strlen'd. Are the
keys in practice similar to data that's somewhat restricted in its range
like a random password that someone may type in or copy or more like
random binary data? My read of the RFC [2] is we must support both. I've
suggested we use this format:

identity:ascii:.JVLF@!):1g=:v]yN=?q}OV|JDs.P+B9JQ|XY&d:jIlew:#\>HhyCN4ADa^v14.\
identity:hex:2E4A564C464021293A31673D3A765D794E3D3F717D4F567C4A44732E502B42394A517C585926643A6A496C65773A235C3E486879434E344144615E7631342E5C
identity:file:path

like this:
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_SSL_PSK, "identity:hex:b33f");

Isaac has countered with splitting the id from the key into
CURLOPT_SSL_PSK_ID and CURLOPT_SSL_PSK_{ASCII,FILE,HEX}_KEY like this:
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_SSL_PSK_ID, "identity");
curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_SSL_PSK_HEX_KEY, "b33f");

I don't like that though because it adds too many curl options. We could
do CURLPSKOPT_ defines but I still don't like it because the RFC allows
for the server to prefer an identity and we may want to support that one
day, which would require on our end support for setting multiple
identity/key pairs in libcurl, so that's something else to consider.

- Disabling certificate and hostname verification and specify cipher: In
order to use some forms of PSK currently the ssl verify options must be
disabled, which currently looks like this:

curl_easy_setopt(hnd, CURLOPT_SSL_PSK, "client_id:jqwertyuiopasdfihjlz");
curl_easy_setopt(hnd, CURLOPT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST, "PSK-AES256-CBC-SHA");
curl_easy_setopt(hnd, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0L);
curl_easy_setopt(hnd, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0L);

And for the tool I assume would be curl -k --tls-psk
client_id:jqwertyuiopasdfihjlz --ciphers PSK-AES256-CBC-SHA

I think it would be good if we could make it so just the psk line is
needed but apparently we need some way to signal whether certificate and
hostname verification is required, or in other words whether or not it's
RSA PSK. I'm concerned that since there isn't a propensity to check the
result of curl_easy_setopt someone may set PSK when PSK is not available
and end up with all verification disabled, and if it's a different SSL
library then the cipher may not be set either. I don't know how likely
that will be. We could update the doc and example to say must check the
return of CURLOPT_SSL_PSK.

I wonder if there's some better solution, like check which cipher the
server returned and if it's a PSK cipher that doesn't use cert/host
verification then we skip that part. Isaac did suggest that early on,
but it may be complicated to do.

[1]: https://github.com/bagder/curl/pull/394
[2]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4279

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Received on 2015-11-03