Subject: Re: Security for various IETF services
From: "Stewart Bryant (stbryant)" <[email-masked]>
To: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Cc: IETF-Discussion <[email-masked]>, The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2014 08:50:21 +0000
List-Id: IETF-Discussion <ietf.ietf.org>

>> 
>> "The IETF are committed to providing secure and privacy
>> friendly access to information via the web, mail, jabber
>> and other services.

Please confirm that "friendly" implies that the user gets to
choose the degree of security privacy that they consider 
appropriate, and that their applications and devices are not 
encumbered  with the overheads unless they choose to invoke
the privacy and security mechanisms.

>> While most (but not all) data on IETF
>> services is public, nonetheless access to that data
>> should use best practices for security and privacy.

I agree, but please can you clarify your interpretation
of "best practise" so that we can understand how
liberal or prescriptive this is?

>> However, as there are numerous legacy tools that have been
>> built that require access via cleartext, the IETF will
>> continue to allow such access so as not to break such
>> tooling. New services will however generally only be made
>> available in ways that use security protocols such as
>> TLS."
>> 

That is worrying, because it seems that you are intent on
encumbering transactions, without requiring a case by 
case study of the threat model, and applying a security
and privacy model that is appropriate to the specific 
transaction.

Stewart.