[Pearg] IRTF Chair review of draft-irtf-pearg-censorship-06

[Colin Perkins <[e-mail]>]

The PEARG chairs have requested that draft-irtf-pearg-censorship-06 be published as an RFC on the IRTF stream. The IRTF publication process is described in RFC 5743, and comprises a review by the IRSG to ensure technical and editorial quality, followed by a check by the IESG to ensure the work does not conflict with IETF standards activities.

As IRTF Chair, I perform an initial review of all drafts submitted for publication on the IRTF stream before sending them for detailed review by the IRSG. This note provides my review comments, for discussion.

Authors, please can you also respond to this message to confirm that all necessary IPR disclosures, as described on https://irtf.org/policies/ipr,  have been made?

Result: Ready with nits

RFC 5743 compliance: The draft does not follow the guidelines in RFC 5743

Comments:

Firstly, apologies for my slow review. This is a well written document that addresses an important topic.

I noticed one minor procedural matter that needs addressing: the statements required by RFC 5743 section 2.1 are missing in the Abstract and Introduction. The draft will require an update to add these before it can move forward.

I also had two questions for discussion, which may or may not require changes to the draft:

There are two places where specific censorship products are mentioned, along with citations of their use (SmartFilter in §3 and §4.2.1, NetSweeper in §4.2.1). Given that the set of such products changes over time, and is likely to become rapidly obsolete, I wonder if the draft might better just list the classes of products and leave the specifics to the cited sources?

§4.2.3: “Note that TLS 1.3 acts as a security component of QUIC” – do the differences in the way TLS integrates with QUIC affect censorship as described in this draft?


Colin Perkins
IRTF Chair