Re: IETF blog post on ACME

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 7:11 AM Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 6:17 PM Lloyd Wood <lloyd.wood=
> [e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> Richard,
>>
>>
>> your IETF blog post says:
>>
>> "the server that needs a certificate can send in its information in a
>> standard form"
>> I do get nervous seeing the 'standard' word used in IETF material; the
>> IETF has a specific standards process, IETF material has to be careful in
>> its terminology.
>>
>>
>> While RFC 8555 is published as an RFC and as a proposed standard, it is
>> not yet an IETF standard.
>>
>
> This distinction, while true, seems not very helpful.
>
> Many of the most important and widely implemented documents in the IETF
> are PS and may take a very long time to be promoted to FS, if ever (IPv6
> was only so promoted last year!). Given that,
>

I don't usually correct myself, but this actually changes the meaning.
There should be no comma after "Given that".

-Ekr

people often wait to implement and deploy protocols until they are
> "standardized" or "finalized", trying to stop people from calling those
> documents standards seems counterproductive (as well as largely futile).
>
> -Ekr
>
>
>
>
>> The Let's Encrypt crowd have been saying:
>>
>>
>>
>> "The protocol we use for automated certificate management, ACME, is now
>> finalized as an Internet standard!"
>> or
>> "the ACME protocol became an IETF standard with RFC 8555."
>> or
>> "
>> The ACME Protocol is an IETF Standard
>>
>> It has long been a dream of ours for there to be a standardized protocol
>> for certificate issuance and management. That dream has become a reality
>> now that the IETF has standardized the ACME protocol as RFC 8555."
>> https://letsencrypt.org/2019/03/11/acme-protocol-ietf-standard.html
>>
>> which is slightly overstating it (proposed standard is NOT finalized and
>> is NOT an IETF Standard), while inadvertently(?) dismissing the IETF
>> standards process that you'd think active participants would understand...
>>
>> "in an agreed form" is less misleading, I think.
>>
>> sigh.
>>
>> L.
>>
>> Lloyd Wood [e-mail] http://about.me/lloydwood
>>
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: Richard Barnes <[e-mail]>
>> To: IETF discussion list <[e-mail]>
>> Sent: Wednesday, 13 March 2019, 7:39
>> Subject: IETF blog post on ACME
>>
>>
>>
>> Hey all,
>>
>> In honor of ACME finally being published as an RFC, my co-authors and I
>> wrote a quick blog post announcing ACME and why it matters:
>>
>> https://www.ietf.org/blog/acme/
>>
>> The tl;dr is:
>> - Certificates are necessary to make secure applications scale
>> - Getting a certificate used to be hard, but ACME makes it easy
>> - Now we can encrypt all the things!
>>
>> For those of you more at the networking layer, think of it like DHCP --
>> long ago, IP address assignment was manual and slow, and we needed an
>> automated way of handing out addresses to make the Internet scale.  Same
>> thing here, but for the PKI.
>>
>> Sincere thanks to the many contributors to this work!
>>
>>
>> --Richard
>>
>>