Re: [secdir] secdir review of draft-kuegler-ipsecme-pace-ikev2

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 11:00 AM, Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On Apr 14, 2011, at 8:38 AM, Nico Williams wrote:
>> Of course, PACE is targeting Experimental... do we care about
>> cryptographic issues in Experimental RFCs?  I'd say we should, though
>> less so than for Standards Track RFCs since we can only spare so much
>> energy.
>
> If we "care about" such things, they should be discussed on open mailing lists, particularly if you are criticizing academic publications related to the document.

I'm not sure what you mean.  I cc'ed all, and reviewers are supposed
to cc authors, so the authors should have a copy of my reply.  Also,
over on the IPsec list we've been discussing password-based mechanisms
(though not this one, yet, because I didn't know it was progressing so
fast).  Since I just became aware of these issues as a result of a
secdir posting, that's where I replied.

Are you suggesting that secdir reviews should always be cc'ed to the
lists where the I-Ds in question were first reviewed?  Or that
responders to secdir reviews should do so?  Did I do something wrong?
Really?

>> I'm rather disappointed to see this wheel reinvented.  SCRAM (RFC5802)
>> would fit right in instead of PACE, for example, and has the same
>> kinds of properties as PACE, but with a number of advantages over PACE
>> (SCRAM is on the Standards Track, received much more review, uses a
>> PBKDF with salt and iteration count, is implemented, is reusable in
>> many contexts, does channel binding, there's an LDAP schema for
>> storing SCRAM password verifiers, ...).
>>
>> We, secdir, should be encouraging wheel reuse wherever possible over
>> wheel reinvention.
>
> "We" never have encouraged that. Many of "us" are chairs of WGs whose charters explicitly allow or mandate the opposite of what you are proposing. If you want a change, it has to come from the ADs, not from "us".

"We", secdir, are volunteers.  This volunteer would rather avoid wheel
reinvention, and this volunteer, perhaps naively, had hoped others
would agree.  Perhaps other volunteers disagree (you do).  I
explicitly referred to secdir, not WG chairs, not ADs, nor did I refer
to actual current practice, but rather stated an opinion of what we
ought to do.

All that aside, is it really the case that "we" (secdir) don't mind
the lack of salting?  Really?!  In 2011, four decades or so since the
invention of salting?  Or did you really just mean to criticize me for
not cc'ing the IPsec list on my reply?

Nico
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