Re: [MLS] MLS: the WG name should include "group"

Thanks for raising this point. I'm also no good at naming, but agree that there's potential scope to name more clearly. A couple of points in response to the specific issues you raised though:

While most of the discussion has focused on groups, my feeling is that this is because group is a more challenging superset of the pairwise case; and we should still care about pairwise messaging. In the pairwise case I think the main differentiator compared with TLS is the requirement for asynchronicity; so if we're clearly carving up the territory it might make sense to highlight this.

Just my 2c though. I have no objection at all to changing the name, and certainly agree that group support is a crucial aspect that could be worth highlighting.

Jon

On 24 Mar 2018, at 13:15, Shivan <shivankaul.1993@gmail.com<mailto:shivankaul.1993@gmail.com>> wrote:

+1 the name seems to be inspired by TLS but the drafts concern themselves explicitly with group messaging, not messaging as a whole.

On Sat, Mar 24, 2018, 11:28 AM Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net<mailto:dkg@fifthhorseman.net>> wrote:
Thanks for all the work that has gone into the proposed MLS architecture
and protocol drafts already.

As we move toward working group formation, i'm a little bit concerned
that the ostensible name of the project ("message layer security")
doesn't adequately describe the most salient features.

We spent most of the time at the BoF in IETF 101 London talking about
the design of the group key agreement scheme and the strong
cryptographic properties we want it to provide -- and i suspect that
most of the work in any formed WG will center around that problem.

So it seems odd to me that the word "group" doesn't appear in the name
"MLS".

I'm no good at acronyms, but i'll just throw out two alternatives:

  MSG: Messaging Security for Groups

  MESSAGE: Message Encryption and Security Standard for Asynchronous Group Environments

I hope since the WG isn't yet formed, it's not too late to consider a
change to the name.  We ought to be up front about the group-specific
context that we're talking about here, as we already have a security
layer that works for messages passing between two endpoints
synchronously (TLS) and it'd be nice to clearly carve up the territory.

        --dkg
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