Re: [kitten] I-D Action: draft-ietf-kitten-rfc6112bis-01.txt

[Greg Hudson <[e-mail]>]

On 07/26/2016 03:38 PM, [e-mail] wrote:
> 	Filename        : draft-ietf-kitten-rfc6112bis-01.txt

This revision appears to be editorial, and would be unlikely to affect
an implementation.  I do not have any substantive protocol concerns, but
I do have some minor issues with some of the new wording.

In section 7, "To ensure that an attacker cannot create a channel with a
given name" was changed to "To ensure that an attacker cannot create a
channel by observing exchanges."  The original wording may have used
"name" in a non-intuitive way, but I think the new wording is more
wrong.  The threat is that a MITM attacker might create two channels
with the same ticket session key (known to the attacker); the new
wording suggests that the threat comes from a passive attacker.

In this text:

    Such authorization data, if included in the anonymous ticket, would
    disclose the that the client is a member of the group observed.	

After the changes, there is an extra "the" before "that".

In this new block of text:

    This protocol provides a binding between the party which
    generated the session key and the DH exchange used to generate
    they reply key.  Hypothetically, if the KDC did not use
    PA-PKINIT-KX, the client and KDC would perfrom a DH key
    exchange to determine a shared key, and that key would be used
    as a reply key.  The KDC would then generate a ticket with a
    session key encrypting the reply with the DH agreement.  A MITM
    attacker would just decrypt the session key + ticket using the
    DH key from the attacker and KDC DH exchange, and re-encrypt it
    using the key from the attacker and client DH exchange, while
    keeping a copy of the session key and ticket.  By requiring the
    session key in a way that can be verified by the client, this
    protocol binds the ticket to the DH exchange and prevents the
    MITM attack.

"perfrom" should be "perform".  "session key + ticket" should be
"session key and ticket".  It might be clearer to say "attacker-KDC DH
exchange" than "attacker and KDC DH exchange", and similarly
"attacker-client DH exchange".

"By requiring the session key in a way that..." is not grammatical.