Re: [Iotops] OFFLIST Review of draft-hsothers-iotsens-ps-02

[[e-mail]]

Hi Janfred, all,
regarding your valuable comments on the draft we will consider your thoughts as provided in a bit more detail in-line below.
Hope that it becomes more clear and concise then.
Thanks again and please stay tuned for the next revision to come …
Best regards
Behcet and Dirk
On Thu, Oct 13, 2022 at 5:18 AM <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
Hi Janfred,
thanks for the thorough and constructive review! We will take into account your issues for the planned next revision of the draft and will come back to you soon!

Viele Grüße/Best regards
Dirk
-----Original Message-----
From: Iotops <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> On Behalf Of Jan-Frederik Rieckers
Sent: Mittwoch, 12. Oktober 2022 18:38
To: [e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>
Subject: [Iotops] Review of draft-hsothers-iotsens-ps-02

Hi to all,

during the iotops session at IETF114 I volunteered to review the hsothers-iotsens-ps draft.
I am very sorry that it took me so long, but finally I can post this review here:



The direction this draft takes was not immediately clear to me, and I needed three reads of the introduction to come up with a hypothesis of what the draft is trying to say.
I have had brief contact with the authors who gave a short explanation of what the draft actually wants to accomplish. I would suggest to reword the abstract to explain more clearly what the draft is actually about.
DH> we will reword the abstract accordingly, e.g. new proposal:
In framework of future 6G the need for easy and secure connectivity between a great amount of small devices as sensors and household appliances will be essential.  Such massive Internet of Things (mIoT) requires authentication methods which are reliable also in case of vulnerable wireless links and work for simple cheap (dumb) devices.
Aim of this document is to lay ground for the need for new authentication models and admission methods in the framework of devices (e.g., machines in IoT communication) within a (wireless or wireline-based) network.
An example for establishing an out-of-band channel for exchange of authentication material may be radio sensing currently under investigation at Wireless LAN/6G (IEEE/3GPP) which would minimize the required amount of physical interfaces at the devices.
DH> would the text above work for you?

Generally, I feel that the structure of the draft needs to be revised.
Especially the introduction lists a number of use cases, where it was not really clear to me if the examples given are the desired or the undesired methods.
Clearly pointing out what "currently is" and what "will be" will help people reading the draft to get a clear picture.
The actual goal of the document is listed at the beginning of Section 3, so maybe the first sentence there (or its general statement) could be included in the abstract and introduction in some way.
DH> Thanks for the hint, we will follow!

Regarding the flow of reading I had a few problems to read the draft, which also lead to the high delay. (English is not my native language and I need to have the mental capacity for reading long or difficult texts).

The draft has a high number of long sentences, where it was not always clear to me how the sentence is structured, so it took me two or three attempts to read some sentences to understand them.
Also a number of sentences have parts in parentheses, sometimes excessively. This made it very difficult for me to get the actual statement of a sentence or even to keep track where in the sentence I was.
DH> Thanks - we will shorten the sentences and try to be more precise!

It also uses phrases where it is not always clear if it is a description or the name of a protocol/method/... (e.g. "LED light" in section 4.1).

DH> We will add the corresponding words to clarify

The later sections (namely 4 and 5) appear to be in a early work-in-progress stage, from both a formal and content perspective.
Based on the sentence structure I assumed that at some point in the description of EAP-NOOB there should be an itemized list of steps, but it was displayed as continuous text.
DH> Right, we want to stimulate further ideas here and will add the corresponding lists

I was also a bit puzzled by the explanation of EAP-NOOB in this draft.
It seems to leave out quite a bit on what the protocol is actually about and includes things not specified in EAP-NOOB (e.g. 802.15.4, ZigBee and CoAP are not mentioned in RFC9140 at all, the smartphone does not necessarily need to be connected to the AAA server using 4G/5G, there is no specified need for user accounts on the server)
DH> We shall clarify what is EAP-NOOB specific and what are additions and examples also introduced from other researchers

There are also issues in the explanation of BRSKI (e.g. mentioning the meaning of the abbreviation twice). I dindn't quite get why a BRSKI explanation was included in this draft in the first place.

DH> we may leave BRSKI out here to not complicate things

In conclusion, although I find the general idea of using WiFi sensing as a possible Out-of-Band channel quite interesting, I do not feel that the
  draft really explains (yet) how this could be used.
The problems with the current OOB methods are not explained in a structured understandable manner (at least from my understanding) and the benefits of using WiFi sensing are not clear.

DH> Thanks for the hint – we will add that


Going forward I would suggest to the authors to restructure the draft, maybe even starting over with the complete text body based on a revised outline more fitted to the statement this draft wishes to communicate.
This would hopefully lead to a text with better flow of reading.



I hope this review helps the authors, and I would be happy to review upcoming versions (as far as my other work allows).

DH> Indeed very helpful comments – thanks we will consider and provide a new version!

Greetings

Janfred

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