Re: [sacm] ECP question

Dan,

Thank you for the review! Your understanding of MAC addresses mirrors mine:
they are not trustworthy as a sole device identifier. I think that, despite
that, they are still worth collection, for two reasons:

1) For device identity correlation-- For some network analytics, the MAC
address is what they can see. These analytics should have the capability to
correlate the behavior they see from an endpoint with a particular MAC
address to a better device identifier. One way to do that is to provide all
the identifiers an endpoint has (IP address, MAC address, device
certificate, etc.) to the CMDB. For traditional endpoints, the ECP requires
IF- IMC and (on the server side) IF-IMV. These interfaces allow endpoints
to share multiple forms of identity to the server, and then stored in the
CMDB for this sort of use case.

2) For attack identification-- ECP enables event-driven collection of
endpoint data. That is, if something changes on the endpoint, ECP enables
that change to be immediately (or, close to immediately) sent to the
server, and then to the CMDB. An endpoint could share any changes to its
MAC address as a part of that event-driven collection, which would help
network tools notice a malicious change in near-real-time.

Given these reasons, I would like to keep MAC addresses as a type of device
identity in the ECP.

I wonder if we could resolve your comments by including a note in the
security considerations about the trust limitations of MAC addresses. We
can say that they really should not be used as a sole device identifier,
and, if other identities can be reported, they really ought to be collected
at the same time as a MAC address. What do you think?

Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts!

Jess

On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 8:45 PM Dan Ehrlich <dan=
40ehrlichserver.com@dmarc.ietf.org> wrote:

> Link I mentioned:
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-sacm-ecp/?include_text=1
> <https://datatracker.ietf..org/doc/draft-ietf-sacm-ecp/?include_text=1>
>
> Section 3.2.1
>
> On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 5:42 PM Dan Ehrlich <dan@ehrlichserver.com> wrote:
>
>> In the RFC for ECP, there is a section that mentions the potential use of
>> MAC addresses for identifying endpoints.
>>
>> My understanding is that there are many things wrong with MAC addresses
>> today, such as that they can now be changed randomly by software, can't
>> really be verified, can be spoofed easily, etc.
>>
>> I cannot find the link I was using from yesterday, but can the MAC
>> address mention be removed from ECP?
>>
>>
>> Apologies if I viewed an old draft or if this was previously discussed,
>>
>> Dan Ehrlich
>> Austin, Texas
>> https://linkedin.com/in/danehrlich/
>> <https://www.linkedin.com/in/danehrlich/>
>>
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