Re: [Cfrg] dragonfly, was: Re: Time to recharter CFRG as a working group? Was: Re: [secdir] ISE seeks help with some crypto drafts

[Andy Lutomirski <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 9:38 AM Tony Arcieri <[e-mail]> wrote:
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> There is, if nothing else, some confusion around the IETF's relationship to Dragonfly, both within the WiFi Alliance and by tech journalists. Some examples:
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> https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/cfrg/lNFkQxnCQpi7dEX6cNI0ewZAuGw
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>> Also note individual submission: https://tools.ietf..org/html/draft-harkins-salted-eap-pwd-02 EMU and Security Area review incorporated, IETF Last Call pending.. Related draft (will be RFC 7664), see https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-irtf-cfrg-dragonfly/ .
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>
> https://www.darkreading.com/operations/wpa3-brings-new-authentication-and-encryption-to-wi-fi/d/d-id/1332145
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>> WPA3 Personal authentication is a process called a simultaneous authentication of equals (SAE), which comes from the IETF Dragonfly key exchange. Robinson says that with SAE, the authentication requires interaction, and only after authentication will the keys be generated. This makes attacks that depend on cloud-based server farms and automated key attempts unavailable to attackers.
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> https://www.eweek.com/security/next-generation-wpa3-wifi-security-standard-launches
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>> "SAE uses a Dragonfly handshake defined in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) RFC 7664 specification and applies it to a WiFi network for password-based authentication," Robinson explained. "The Wi-Fi Alliance WPA3 specification defines additional requirements for devices operating in SAE modes."
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>
> From what I've observed, the IETF's name seems to end up attached to Dragonfly quite a bit. Curiously in these quotes, the CFRG and IRTF aren't mentioned at all. Perhaps this speaks to a more general problem around public perception of RGs and informational RFCs (or lack thereof), but when I read quotes like this, they sound to me like many people's perception is that Dragonfly is a standards-track IETF RFC.
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> Issues like educating the tech press and trade associations on the difference between the IETF and IRTF and the difference between standards-track and informational RFCs aside, I think the main thing the IETF could do address these concerns is actually create a WG dedicated to producing a standards-track PAKE for similar use cases. PAKEs are certainly a hot topic these days, both on the CFRG (see OPAQUE thread this morning) and in cryptography in general.
>

As far as I can tell, basically anyone who isn't involved in the IETF
or IRTF is utterly confused as to why they're called RFCs in the first
place.  Some of them seem to be standards (de facto, "standards
track", or otherwise), some of them are definitions of a cryptographic
protocol like CFRG produces (which sounds a lot like "standard" to
me), and very few of them indeed appear to be requests for comments.
It's entirely unclear when an RFC is supposed to be a statement that
IETF or IRTF thinks the thing in the document is a good idea.

I think the messaging could be made much, much more clear.