Re: [ANCP] Privacy issue in draft-ietf-ancp-mc-extensions-12

Hello Tom,

I think these TLVs bring some value:
The ANCP Multicast Admission Control message supports the "Conditional Access and Admission Control Use Case". When conditional access is to be performed on a per device basis (as opposed to per DSL line basis), the message needs to provide the NAS with a way to identify the device.

In general (and more or less by definition) the NAS has a lot of visibility on each DSL line (certainly for unicast), so I assume the privacy concern is not so much about communicating the info to the NAS but has more to do with the risk of a monitoring attack of the ANCP protocol. Right?

How about an alternative approach where we keep these TLVs in the document and keep them as optional, but add a note that says that:
	* including those TLVs in the message is only useful when the NAS is to perform per-device "Conditional Access and Admission Control"
	* including those TLVs in the message results in an increased privacy concern because it exposes on the wire the corresponding privacy information about which IP/MAC is accessing which multicast channel, which could be exploited by a monitoring attack on the ANCP protocol.
	* these TLVs SHOULD NOT be included when per-device "Conditional Access and Admission Control" by the NAS is not used

Makes sense?

Francois

On 1 Dec 2013, at 21:50, Tom Taylor <tom.taylor.stds@gmail.com>
 wrote:

> In his review of draft-ietf-ancp-mc-extensions-12, our AD pointed out that the optional presence of the Request-Source-IP or Request-Source-MAC TLV in the ANCP Multicast Admission Control message posed privacy issues. Looking through the ANCP requirements in RFC 5851 and TR-101, I could find no requirement that these be reported.
> 
> I proposed that these TLVs be dropped from the message and from the document. I will assume that I have consent for this change if I do not hear arguments against it by the end of Wednesday, December 18.
> 
> Tom Taylor
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