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Re: [babel] babel-hmac: key requirements

"STARK, BARBARA H" <bs7652@att.com> Wed, 16 January 2019 15:46 UTC

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From: "STARK, BARBARA H" <bs7652@att.com>
To: 'Juliusz Chroboczek' <jch@irif.fr>, Toke Høiland-Jørgensen <toke@toke.dk>
CC: Babel at IETF <babel@ietf.org>
Thread-Topic: [babel] babel-hmac: key requirements
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Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2019 15:45:59 +0000
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Subject: Re: [babel] babel-hmac: key requirements
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I don't seem to be communicating well what I'm looking for. An informative appendix doesn't solve my problem. The advice is nice, but it's not what I'm needing.
Let me try saying this differently.

If it weren't for OSPF defining 2 different keys (the entered key and the cryptographic key) and the HMAC RFC 2104 defining the jey as something of variable length that gets hashed when it's longer than the block size, I/we wouldn't have a problem. But because of those specs (and RFC 2104 is normatively referenced), the term "HMAC key" is ambiguous. A careful reader might not see it as ambiguous and understand what's implied by the text; but all readers aren't careful.

Therefore, I would like for babel-hmac to resolve this ambiguity by providing a prominent (hard to miss) definition of "HMAC key".

Here's another suggestion for how this might be achieved.
Insert a section under Data Structures of:

## The HMAC Key
The HMAC key is a string of bytes the length of which is exactly the block size of the HMAC algorithm being used. Note this is different  from the [RFC2104] definition.

----------------------------
A second problem I have (which doesn't need to be resolved by text in babel-hmac, but can be dealt with in information-model) is the format to use for supplying an input that becomes an HMAC key. I think we're somewhere between binary and hex at this point. I don't care which, but I need to choose one or the other.

Barbara

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