Re: Application data during key re-exchange

[Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld%orchard.arlington.ma.us@localhost>]

I simply don't see this as a showstopper.

> Then all channels on the connection will freeze
> completely during the entire key exchange process, which seems
> undesirable, in particular with slow connections and machines. 

In many cases, the same sort of "freeze" will often happen if a TCP
segment is dropped (particularly when the traffic flow is
character-at-a-time interactive traffic); tcp falls back to the
retransmission timeout, which is typically several hundred ms.

Over a high latency path, you'll probably get more than one TCP
segment drop per hour.  Will the end user be able to tell the
difference between rekey and dropped packets?

Worrying too much about slow machines is historically not a good use
of people's engineering efforts.

						- Bill