[Gen-art] Telechat Review of draft-ietf-httpauth-extension-08

[Matt Miller <[e-mail]>]

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Document: draft-ietf-httpauth-extension-08
Reviewer: Matthew A. Miller
Review Date: 2016-08-31
IETF LC End Date: 2016-08-26
IESG Telechat date: 2016-09-01

Summary:

This document is almost ready for publication as an Experimental
RFC, once the minor and editorial issues are addressed.

Major issues:

NONE

Minor issues:

* There is at least a couple of mentions of the
"Authentication-Info" header, but no reference to RFC 7615 in which
it is defined.  I think an informational reference is warranted
here.

* Just reading sections 4.5. "Location-when-logout parameter" and
4.6. "Logout-timeout parameter", it is unclear how these are meant
to interact to inform a client the user's authentication session.
Frankly, I think the text in section 4.5 is too vague about how
a client can detect termination of a user's authenticated session,
and could use more of a hint on how "logout-timeout" is involved
to accomplish it. At the least, I think both sections 4.5. and
4.6. need pointers to section 5. to help readers get a
sense of how to apply them.

* In section 4.7. "Username parameter", I think there should be
an explicit pointer to the Security Considerations to warn about
potential issues this parameter presents.  I also recommend
separating that portion of the Security Considerations about
"username" into its own subsection to make such a callout
better.

* Since this document is acknowledging that cookies are used for
authentication, and

Nits/editorial comments:

* In section 2.1. "Terms for describing authentication protocol
flow", the word "distinguishable" should instead be "distinguished"
in the phrase "it can't be distinguishable from a non-authenticated
response."

* In section 3. "Optional Authentication", the word "be" is missing
in "Optional-WWW-Authenticate header MUST NOT sent on 401
responses".

* In section 3.1. "Note on Optional-WWW-Authenticate and use of
WWW-Authenticate header with non-401 status", the word "is" should
be replaced with "are" in the phrase "clients which is unaware of
this extension will ignore the header".

* Also in section 3.1., the word "authentications" should be
"authentication" in the phrase "secondary fallback method of
authentications".

* Also in section 3.1., the word "ignores" should be "ignore" in
the phrase "just ignores the WWW-Authenticate headers".

* Also in section 3.1., all instances of the word "implementer"
should be replaced with "implementers" in the phrase "the authors
propose implementer of the standard HTTP/1.1 specification
(especially implementer of this extension)".

* In section 4. "Authentication-Control header", the word "an"
should be "a" in the phrase "and MUST be sent in an plain".

* In section 4.1. "Non-ASCII extended header parameters", the
interoperability note as a number of grammatical challenges.
I believe the following addresses the grammar issues while
retaining its meaning:

    """
    Interoperability note: [RFC7235], Section 2.2, defines the "realm"
    authentication parameter which cannot be replaced by the "realm*"
    extend parameter.  It means that the use of non-ASCII values for an
    authentication realm is not the defined behavior in HTTP.
    Unfortunately, some people currently use a non-ASCII realm parameter
    in reality, but even its encoding scheme is not well-defined.
    Given this background, this document does not specify how to handle
    a non-ASCII "realm" parameter in the extended header fields.  If
    needed, the authors propose to use a non-extended "realm" parameter
    form, with a wish for maximum interoperability.
    """

* In section 4.2. "Auth-style parameter", the word "preferences"
should be replaced with "preference" in the phrase "server's
preferences for user interface behavior".

* In section .4.4. "No-auth parameter", the word "authentications"
should be replaced with "authentication" in the phrase "content is
desired before authentications".

* In section 4.6. "Logout-timeout parameter", the word "from" should
be removed in the phrase "has passed since from the time this header
was received".

* In section 5.3. "When to use Cookies", the first sentence has some
grammatical challenges, which I believe the following text addresses:

    """
    In current Web sites using form-based authentication, Cookies
    [RFC6265] are used for managing both authorization and
    application sessions.
    """

* In section 5.4. "Parallel deployment with Form/Cookie
authentications", the META tag example should be "<META
http-equiv="refresh" ...>" instead of ">META http-equiv="refresh"
...<".

* In section 7. "IANA Considerations", the word "documents" should
be "document" in the phrase "a publicly-accessible documents".