Maybe It's Snake Oil All the Way Down

[Bodo Moeller]

pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann):

> [0] Note that my SSL implementation follows the standard SSL ladder diagram
>     rather than the state-machine that SSL implementations are usually
>     described as, which made it trivial to switch over for SSHv2 use.  I've
>     never understood why every explanation of the SSL protocol I've ever seen
>     uses ladder diagrams but once they talk about implementation details they
>     assume you're doing it as a state machine, which makes it vastly harder to
>     implement.  For example all the stuff about pending cipher suites and
>     whatnot follows automatically (and transparently) from the ladder diagram,
>     but is a real pain to sort out in a state machine.

Using an explicit state machine helps to get code suitable for
multiplexing within a single thread various connections using
non-blocking I/O.


-- 
Bodo Mvller <moeller at cdc.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de>
PGP http://www.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/TI/Mitarbeiter/moeller/0x36d2c658.html
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