Re: Gen-ART LC review of draft-ietf-tls-chacha20-poly1305-04 - resend

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

Hi Roni.

I think I can explain one of your questions.


> On 8 Apr 2016, at 5:36 PM, Roni Even <[e-mail]> wrote:

<snip />

>> Also note, the registry rules are:
>> 
>> 0-191	Standards Action			Refers to value of first byte
>> 192-254	Specification Required		Refers to value of first byte
>> 255		Reserved for Private Use  	Refers to value of first byte
> [Roni Even] So  I would like to assume that there was a reason to have two different policies so why not follow it.

<snip />


>> From  RFC4346 a.5 "Cipher suite values with first byte decimal 192 (0xC0) through
>         decimal 254 (0xFE) inclusive are reserved for assignment for
>         non-Standards Track methods."
> 
> So this is the reason to have the registration as non standard document.   I looked at Camellia and it follows your explanation except for updating the TLS specification yet it uses the first byte from the range 0-191.  So my question will be why did you use the first byte from 192 - range?

The WG specifically requested these values. Google was eager to have this algorithms in Chrome, so they chose some values at (almost) random that were not being used by anyone else. Others have followed suit and a number of other implementations use the same values (NSS, OpenSSL). So these identifiers are now “out there”. In retrospect, it would have been better if they had squatted on the “Standards Action” range, but by now it doesn’t make much of a difference.

HTH

Yoav