[MLS] Two poorly defined aspects of the spec

[Cornelissen Eric <[e-mail]>]

Hi All,


I have two questions about things that are unclear to me in the current state of the spec as they are undefined/poorly defined.



1. What is the intended value of interim_transcript_hash_[0]?

>From the current draft I cannot definitively (i.e. with 100% certainty) say whether the value of the first interim_transcript_hash should be:

a. "the zero-length octet string" following the last line of Group state section<https://github.com/mlswg/mls-protocol/blob/39455d2ea5e8fb42e8f0f0624bddd8c56675da0e/draft-ietf-mls-protocol.md#group-state><https://github.com/mlswg/mls-protocol/blob/master/draft-ietf-mls-protocol.md#group-state>, or
b. a value derived based on the MLSPlaintextCommitAutData for the first commit concatenated with 0:
    interim_transcript_hash_[0]
        = Hash(confirmed_transcript_hash_[0] || MLSPlaintextCommitAuthData_[0])
        = Hash(0 || MLSPlaintextCommitAuthData_[0])

The draft strongly suggests to me that it is the former, but the latter seems to more accurately reflect the statement "The confirmed_transcript_hash field contains a running hash over the messages that led to this state."

In the case that a is correct I would suggest updating the definition of interim_transcript_hash_[n] to:

    interim_transcript_hash_[0] = 0
    interim_transcript_hash_[n] =
        Hash(confirmed_transcript_hash_[n] ||
            MLSPlaintextCommitAuthData_[n]);

In the case that b is correct I would suggest adding a "warning" that says something along the lines of "as a placeholder value" to the place(s) where the draft says that the interim_transcript_hash of a group is initialized to 0.


2. What is the `members` array mentioned in the Group creation section<https://github.com/mlswg/mls-protocol/blob/39455d2ea5e8fb42e8f0f0624bddd8c56675da0e/draft-ietf-mls-protocol.md#group-creation>?

In that section it is stated that "A new member receiving a Welcome message can recognize group creation if the number of entries in the `members` array is equal to the number of leaves in the tree minus one." First of all, it is not clear what this `members` array is. It seems this refers to a field of the now-removed Init struct. Interestingly this struct was removed in the very same PR that added the above sentence (see #239<https://github.com/mlswg/mls-protocol/pull/239>). But I wasn't able to really figure out what the draft-09 equivalent of it should be.

In addition, I'm pretty sure this technique would no longer work to detect group creation (but that would depend on how the sentence should be updated).


Regards,
Eric