[secdir] Secdir review of draft-ietf-dmm-requirements-14

[Catherine Meadows <[e-mail]>]

I have reviewed this document as part of the security directorate's
ongoing effort to review all IETF documents being processed by the
IESG.  These comments were written primarily for the benefit of the
security area directors.  Document editors and WG chairs should treat
these comments just like any other last call comments.

This draft gives high-level requirements for distributed mobility management at the network layer.
 It also gives definitions of key concepts and motivation for replacing or augmenting current standards for centralized mobility management (in which information
about location of a mobile node is kept at a centralized mobility anchor) with distributed mobility management, in which
this information is distributed.  This latter includes a list of the problems that can be addressed with DMM.

Although the motivation for distributed mobility management is not the main point of this document, it is very helpful
in helping the reader understand the requirements and their importance, so I am glad to see it there.  Since this, including the
problem statement, is quite important and useful, I’d suggest mentioning it in the abstract.

The requirements are for the most part well-written and at the appropriate level of detail.  However, I have
a few suggestions:

1)  REQ 1 is for distributed processing, but “distributed processing is a rather open-ended term.  It would be a good
idea to include some indication of what is meant by distributed processing here.

2)  There are a couple of points in REQ6: Security considerations that need to be clarified:

2a) Another example is
that a malicious node can forge a number of signaling messages
thus redirecting traffic from its legitimate path.
Consequently, the specific node is under a denial of service
attack, whereas other nodes do not receive their traffic.

It’s not made clear what the specific node is.  It would be better to have something like

Another example is
that a malicious node can forge a number of signaling messages
thus redirecting traffic from its legitimate path.
Consequently, the specific node or nodes to which the traffic is redirected may be under a denial of service
attack, whereas other nodes do not receive their traffic.

2b) Accordingly, security mechanisms/protocols providing access
control, integrity, authentication, authorization,
confidentiality, etc. can be used to protect the DMM entities
as they are already used to protect against existing networks
and existing mobility protocols defined in IETF.

“can be used to protect” seems  awfully weak.  Is there any reason why you don’t want to say SHOULD or MUST?
Or, if you don’t want to make this and IETF SHOULD or MUST, you might want to say  something like “we recommend”. 
Catherine Meadows
Naval Research Laboratory
Code 5543
4555 Overlook Ave., S.W.
Washington DC, 20375
phone: [phone]
fax: [phone]
email: [e-mail]