Re: draft-ietf-dnsext-dnssec-gost

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

At 12:57 PM -0500 2/11/10, Stephen Kent wrote:
>I recommend that the document not be approved by the IESG in its current form.  Section 6.1 states:
>
>>6.1.  Support for GOST signatures
>>
>>   DNSSEC aware implementations SHOULD be able to support RRSIG and
>>   DNSKEY resource records created with the GOST algorithms as
>>   defined in this document.
>
>There has been considerable discussion on the security area directorate list about this aspect of the document. All of the SECDIR members who participated in the discussion argued that the text in 6.1 needs to be changed to MAY from SHOULD. The general principle cited in the discussion has been that "national" crypto algorithms like GOST ought not be cited as MUST or SHOULD in standards like DNESEC. I refer interested individuals to the SECDIR archive for details of the discussion.
>
>(http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/secdir/current/maillist.html)

As usual, I agree completely with Steve Kent. Further, I note that while there was consensus in the DNSEXT WG to put this document on standards track, there was no such consensus for making every DNSSEC implementation come under a new SHOULD-level requirement.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium