Re: ALPN support for GnuTLS connections

[Björn Bidar]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > ALPN allows the client application to tell the server which protocol it
>   > wants to have.
>   > So that e.g. instead of first opening a connection to a http server that
>   > defaults 1.1 and then switching to 2.0 you can immediately open a
>   > connection with 2.0.
>   > The benefit being besides the faster establishment of the connection is
>   > that the client can stop if the requested connection can't be
>   > established before the initial connection.
>
> That makes sense to me.
>
> So I guess that the various tasks you mentioned to me
> have nothing substantial to do with ALPN, but they talk
> via some protocol which has various versions, and they
> use ALPN to do that.  Is that right?

No ALPN just allows to skip the negotiation phase after the initial
connection.
Kinda like using TLS allows you to have an immediate encrypted
connection without using STARTLS.