Re: [Cfrg] RFC 5742 conflict review for draft-dolmatov-kuznyechik

[Dmitry Belyavsky <[e-mail]>]

Dear Stephen,

On Mon, Feb 1, 2016 at 7:33 PM, Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
> Hi Simon,
>
> On the higher level, I agree with those who think this is
> not a 5742 conflict, but I'll point the rest of the IESG
> at this thread so they can read about it themselves.
>
> On 01/02/16 16:27, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> >
> > Yes.  I think Camellia is a good example here.  I recall seeing
> > implementations that preferred Camellia over AES when both were
> > available, which I suspect was due to misunderstanding or mistake.  The
> > document can inform the reader about some aspects, but sometimes having
> > too much rope available causes bad things to happen.
>
> I agree that that happened and was undesirable, but I think
> that the mistake then was in the TLS code point allocation.
> We (the IETF) should've made sure that the registry or the
> specification that created the code points clarified things
> for implementers. With TLS1.3, I think the TLS WG have
> decided to structure the IANA registries so this'll end up
> better. I forget if that'd also mean re-structuring the
> registries for earlier TLS versions or not, but in any case
> the issue is one for the TLS WG (or IPSECME or whoever) and
> not something that the ISE ought handle in the basic spec
> describing the algorithm details.
>

I am not sure that it's a good idea to avoid code point allocation.
As nation-wide regulation requires using nation-specific algorithms,
there will appear specifications for using these algorithms with TLS etc.

The best solution I can imagine for the real world is allocating code
points
for nation-wide algorithms together with providing comments for the
implementers,
that the corresponding algorithm/ciphersuite/etc is nation-specific and not
mandatory.


-- 
SY, Dmitry Belyavsky