[IPsec] Stephen Farrell's Yes on draft-ietf-ipsecme-chacha20-poly1305-11: (with COMMENT)

"Stephen Farrell" <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie> Tue, 07 July 2015 23:15 UTC

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Subject: [IPsec] Stephen Farrell's Yes on draft-ietf-ipsecme-chacha20-poly1305-11: (with COMMENT)
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Stephen Farrell has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-ipsecme-chacha20-poly1305-11: Yes

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COMMENT:
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intro: "gold standard" is being a bit too keen IMO, I'd say
toning the language down a bit would be better.

intro: 3DES may be the "only other widely supported" cipher
for IPsec, but that's not true more generally.

section 2 says: "As the ChaCha20 block function is not applied
directly to the plaintext, no padding should be necessary."
That "should" could be confusing as written if a reader thinks
it means their code doesn't have to do padding. It might be
better to e.g. say something like "In theory no padding is
needed for this cipher, however, in keeping with..." 

section 3: Is "SHOULD inlude no padding" really right?  I'd
have thought a MAY was better there.  "MUST accept any length"
is also a bit odd - what if I (try:-) add loads of padding?

Appendices: thanks for those - I assume someone checked them
for you? (I didn't:-)