Re: [saag] reviews needed of draft-knodel-e2ee-definition

[Viktor Dukhovni <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2022 at 05:49:15PM -0400, Paul Wouters wrote:

> A few people have been working on a document to define what it means to be
> end-to-end encrypted, and wrote this up in a draft.
> 
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-knodel-e2ee-definition-07
> 

A general comment:  I found the language much too dense and verbose.

If the text is to be useful, it needs to be much more concise and
direct.  A rough attempt below:

    End-to-end communication security:

        A property of a communication system in which the message
        originator and intended recipients are the only parties who can
        read or generate messages.  In particular, intermediaries
        (carriers) involved in message delivery have no privileged access.

        Note however that intermediaries may in many cases be able
        to perform "traffic analysis", that is, track who is
        communicating with whom.  Resistance to traffic analysis
        goes beyond simple end-to-end security, and is both fragile
        and much more difficult to implement.

If one then wants to explore use-cases, policy issues, ... that too
should be written in direct and concise language.

-- 
    Viktor.