Re: [babel] WG adoption call for draft-do-babel-hmac (7/19 - 8/6)

[Denis Ovsienko <[e-mail]>]

 ---- On Thu, 19 Jul 2018 13:46:37 +0100 Donald Eastlake <[e-mail]> wrote ---- 
 > This message begins a WG adoption call for draft-do-babel-hmac. 
 > Since this starts during an IETF meeting, it is running for a bit 
 > longer than usual, through August 6th. Please indicate whether you 
 > think this draft should be adopted. Comments on the draft also 
 > welcome. 

I object to the adoption of this document for the following reasons, which should be well-known to anybody who has been on the Babel WG mailing list, but if it takes to rub it in to action, I will rub it in.

1. Questionable attribution of authorship.

The document lists Clara Do as its first author. Clara Do has never ever sent a single message, at all, however short or long, to the Babel WG mailing list. She has never presented anything at a Babel WG meeting, whether in person or remotely. In other words, this person has never participated in this working group.

The document lists Weronika Kolodziejak as its second author. Weronika had sent 1 (one) message to the Babel WG mailing list, but made no other contributions (in the IETF sense of the term).

The document lists Juliusz Chroboczek as its third author. Juliusz in the past couple months had sent an incredible amount of messages to the Babel WG mailing list. Most of those were related to the HMAC-based method of Babel security, which the Babel WG had already decided it will not use. Despite the obvious fact, Juliusz kept bringing the matter up again and again and again and again, most of the text in the proposed document has been committed by him, and at IETF-102 he proposed to adopt this draft shortly after it was first created.

This way, the document looks mainly a product of very recent efforts of Juliusz Chroboczek. Hence when Juliusz at IETF-102 in his HMAC slides stated "I am just the janitor here", that statement was false.

Juliusz Chroboczek had previously commented that Clara Do and Weronika Kolodziejak are his interns. I understand this as they are not independent in their actions, so as a minimum it would be fair to let them speak freely for themselves and to confirm the reasons for appearing on the list of authors for a document that was written mostly by another person.

It would also be very useful to hear about their experience in the areas of network protocols design, implementation and security, and how much time they plan to spend on this project, as this is a Standards Track work and it may be very demanding regardless of what other plans people have in life.


2. What problem does this document solve that has not been solved before?

The Babel WG has already had an opportunity to adopt a HMAC-based solution to fulfill the requirements of its charter, and the WG decided not to adopt. This decision was not rooted in the technical merits of the proposed solution. As far as the WG adoption call materials go, draft-ovsienko-babel-rfc7298bis was good enough and had no unaddressed technical issues, I had already clarified this before.

I had asked, twice, Juliusz Chroboczek about the technical merits of his new HMAC project, and, unfortunately, he had not provided an answer that would be sound and true. Given this input, I have to conclude this document does _not_ solve a problem that would not be solved already.


I am sorry to have to raise issues like this instead of the actual technical points, but the Babel WG, the Homenet WG (which has a dependency on Babel) and the IETF deserve to have true and accurate information about the documents proposed for Standards Track work.

-- 
    Denis Ovsienko