Re: [secdir] draft-ietf-opsawg-hmac-sha-2-usm-snmp-new-03 SECDIR review

[Donald Eastlake <[e-mail]>]

Hi Johannes,

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 5:23 AM, Johannes Merkle
<[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> The Abstract does not mention that this document obsoletes RFC 7630. I
>> think it is a good practice to include that in the Abstract.
>
> That's a good hint. I will do that.
>
>>
>> The first paragraph of the Introduction seems odd to me It says
>>    "This memo defines a portion of the Management Information Base (MIB)
>>    for use with network management protocols. In particular, it defines
>>    additional authentication protocols ..."
>> While I can't actually say this is actually wrong, the portion of the
>> MIB it defines is trivial and it seems to me that the meat is in the
>> specification of the additional authentication protocols. Certainly,
>> those authentication protocol specifications don't appear in the MIB
>> portion specified, only identifiers for them. Yet the wording of the
>> Introduction (... defines a portion of the ... MIB.. In particular,
>> ...) seems to imply that the definition of the additional
>> authentication protocols is a subpart of the portion of the MIB. So I
>> would say the Introduction should begin with something like:
>>    "This document specified additional authentication protocols ... In
>> addition, it defines a portion of the Management Information Base
>> (MIB) containing identifiers for these authentication protocols for
>> use with network management protocols."
>>
>
> Alternatively, the introduction could be rephrased in the line of that of RFC 3826, e.g.,
>
>    Within the Architecture for describing Simple Network Management
>    Protocol (SNMP) Management Frameworks [RFC3411], the User-based
>    Security Model (USM) [RFC3414] for SNMPv3 is defined as a Security
>    Subsystem within an SNMP engine.  In RFC 3414, two different
>    authentication protocols, HMAC-MD5-96 and HMAC-SHA-96, are defined
>    based on the hash functions MD5 and SHA-1, respectively.
>
>    This memo specifies new HMAC-SHA-2 authentication protocols for USM...
>
>
> IMHO that would be a better start.

That alternative text looks fine to me.

Thanks,
Donald
=============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   [phone] (cell)
 155 Beaver Street, Milford, MA 01757 USA
 [e-mail]

> --
> Johannes