Re: [jose] Proposed Text - MUST understand

[Russ Housley <[e-mail]>]

How is an IETF application different than any other application?

The Datatracker, rfcdiff, and xml2rfc will probably never need to use jose, so I know that is not the intended meaning.  ;-)

Russ


On Feb 24, 2013, at 3:32 PM, Jim Schaad wrote:

> I am going to venture some proposed text to try and advance the discussion
> about the MUST understand all fields in the current document.  I acknowledge
> that the text is written from the point of view that I espouse, however I
> think that perhaps it does give a sufficient amount of credence to the point
> of view of other that it might provide a good starting point for
> discussions.
> 
> This text is written standalone and as such I have not yet tried to
> incorporate it into the different documents and in the different locations.
> It is possible that the text will need to be somewhat repurposed when it
> appears in each of the different documents.
> 
> *************************************************************
> 
> Applications which use this specification SHOULD ensure that all of the
> fields in the header are used in either in making the trust decision or
> determining how to use the content.  IETF applications MUST have  default
> position of requiring that all fields in the header are known to and used by
> the application.  IETF applications which allow for fields in the header to
> be ignored MUST include a justification of why this decision was made and
> looking at the security trade-offs of the decision.
> 
> The reason why the default position is that applications need to understand
> and process all of the headers can be seen in the following example.  <Jones
> et al provide a non-trivial example that demonstrates the security problem
> associated with ignoring header fields.>
> 
> ******************************************************************