Re: Last call comments for draft-lepinski-dh-groups-01

At 1:32 PM +0300 10/9/07, <Pasi.Eronen@nokia.com> wrote:
>1) Section 1 says:
>
>    "Sixteen additional groups subsequently have been defined and
>    assigned values by IANA for use with IKE (v1 and v2).  All of
>    these additional groups are optional in the IKE context.  Of
>    the twenty-one groups defined so far, eight are MODP groups
>    (exponentiation groups modulo a prime), ten are EC2N groups
>    (elliptic curve groups over GF[2^N]) and three are ECP groups
>    (elliptic curve groups over GF[P]).
>
>This is not totally correct. As of this writing, no EC2N groups
>have been assigned values for use with IKEv2.  Also, eight of the
>ten EC2N groups for IKEv1 are not documented in any RFC. (And yes,
>I'm aware of draft-ietf-ipsec-ike-ecc-groups -- but that hasn't
>been approved yet, and requires changes before approval.)

draft-lepinski-dh-groups needs to track 
draft-ietf-ipsec-ike-ecc-groups very carefully. If there is any 
mis-match, we will have interoperability problems in the future.

>2) For IKEv1/IKEv2, the document should explicitly specify how
>ECC points are converted to octet strings (for KE payloads
>and resulting shared secret value). Currently, there are at
>least three incompatible options (RFC 4753, RFC 2409, and
>draft-ietf-ipsec-ike-ecc-groups-10 drafts). I'd suggest just
>saying "the same way as in RFC 4753".

This bodes really poorly for interoperability. 
draft-lepinski-dh-groups needs to be revised to specify one of the 
methods, and that needs to be discussed on the IPsec mailing list. I 
would not assume that implementers would prefer RFC 4753 over 
draft-ietf-ipsec-ike-ecc-groups.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

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