Re: [Anima] [6lo] Comments needed for Security Bootstrapping of IEEE 802.15.4 based Internet of Things

[Hannes Tschofenig <[e-mail]>]

Peter, Brian,

I would strongly recommend not to use the term bootstrapping. Replacing
it with some other word that explains what you want to do.

After-all, we are engineers and not marketing guys. I tend to get a bit
nervous when I read terms like "zero-touch" and alike that create the
impression that there is no configuration that needs to be done by
anyone. Of course, that's not the case.

With all the security drafts in NETCONF (zerotouch) or in ANIMA I get
the impression that we are re-inventing the wheel not only because we
want to work on new stuff but largely because we actually don't
understand the state of the art ourselves anymore. I fear that the
<draft-he-iot-security-bootstrapping-00> document also falls into the
category of not understanding the state-of-the-art. I understand if
someone is not up-to-speed with the most recent efforts in Thread
(because they are only visible to members of that organization) but the
ZigBee-IP work should be known. While ZigBee-IP may be considered dead
by know it also appears to me that any new work in the IETF on
security/routing/etc. for IEEE 802.15.4 will have to compete against
Thread. Thread has seen a dramatic growth rate in terms of membership
and so I doubt that work in the same area has a lot of chances for
success.

Sorry for the rant but I believe it will help everyone to figure out
that most of the groups are actually developing the same solutions over
and over again.

Now to the issue of the multi-vendor equipment. Adding new solutions (as
it is done in ANIMA) while other groups and organizations have already
standardized similar technologies (using different terminology) will not
make the interoperability any better. I am sure you know that far too well.

It would be great to have a conversation (maybe at the next IETF
meeting) how the different environments (home environment, enterprise
environments/industrial environments) are different in terms of
provisioning credentials and configuration information to IoT devices.
Needless to say that there are differences and you can see them when you
look at how existing products work. That does, however, not necessarily
mean that there are no common building blocks.

Ciao
Hannes

On 02/21/2015 12:14 PM, peter van der Stok wrote:
> Hi Brian,
> 
> Just a small annotation to your default approach comment.
> Bootstrapping is subject to different installation procedures.
> A clear example is the difference between home (plug and play) and the
> building control where bootstrapping is organized from a database.
> In the professional domain the order of things can depend on the
> installer. For example, some may want to bootstrap together with the
> setup of the network, others may want the network to be ready and then
> do the security bootstrap.
> 
> Although I agree with your concern expressed as "a default procedure to
> decide on the bootstrap procedure", I think there is room for 2-4
> different security bootstrap procedures.
> These procedures will be chosen as function of the application domain
> and application owner, installer.
> 
> Peter
> 
> 
> 
> Brian E Carpenter schreef op 2015-02-20 19:51:
>> Hannes,
>>
>> I agree that we need to compare different approaches. I do have one
>> concern in the anima context that leads me to the conclusion that
>> we *must* pick a preferred solution: if we consider a collection of
>> multivendor equipment in factory condition that we want to bootstrap
>> itself into a secure network when we apply power, I don't see how
>> we can avoid having a single default solution. If not, we get a
>> rather ludicrous situation where we need a single default solution
>> to the problem of choosing which bootstrap solution to use.
>>
>> Regards
>>    Brian
>>
>> On 21/02/2015 01:27, Hannes Tschofenig wrote:
>>> Hi Danping,
>>>
>>> I would also like to note that
>>> [I-D.pritikin-anima-bootstrapping-keyinfra] is only one possible way of
>>> distributing new keys (based on already pre-provisioned certificates). I
>>> would like to understand how it relates to other approaches.
>>> Particularly if you consider an approach "heavy" it would be good to
>>> know what your main concerns are since there is no free lunch with
>>> security and most of the design decisions are trade-offs.
>>>
>>> Ciao
>>> Hannes
>>>
>>> On 02/20/2015 12:59 PM, Robert Cragie wrote:
>>>> [I-D.pritikin-anima-bootstrapping-keyinfra] proposes a zero-touch
>>>> bootstrapping key infrastructure to allow joining device securely and
>>>> automatically bootstraps itself based on 802.1AR certificate.  It can't
>>>> be directly used in 802.15.4 devices due to the high security
>>>> complexity
>>>> and heavy communication overhead.": I disagree with this statement. We
>>>> used this approach in ZigBee IP. I agree some may think the
>>>> communication overhead "heavy" but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
>>>> The associated security complexity is also becoming less onerous as
>>>> crypto accelerators become built into hardware and cores.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Anima mailing list
>>> [e-mail]
>>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/anima
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Anima mailing list
>> [e-mail]
>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/anima