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Re: [secdir] secdir review of draft-alakuijala-brotli-08

Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> Tue, 12 April 2016 16:56 UTC

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From: Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>
To: Tobias Gondrom <tobias.gondrom@gondrom.org>, frank.xialiang@huawei.com, iesg@ietf.org, secdir@ietf.org, draft-alakuijala-brotli.all@ietf.org
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Subject: Re: [secdir] secdir review of draft-alakuijala-brotli-08
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On Tue 2016-04-12 12:16:13 -0400, Tobias Gondrom <tobias.gondrom@gondrom.org> wrote:
> in my understanding this ID is _only_ about a compression, not about
> encryption.  Therefore it is not even intended to be resistant to the
> attack you describe below.  (for proper confidentiality the channel
> would need to be encrypted.)

Agreed, but encryption specs are often _only_ about encryption, even
though they're sometimes layered over a compression protocol.

I think your argument implies that this warning doesn't belong in either
Security Considerations section (of the compression-less encryption
protocol, or of the encryption-less compression protocol), which makes
me sad.

Instead, i think we should make people considering either protocol aware
of the risks of the combination.  This doesn't have to be a huge edit,
just a short paragraph in the security considerations.

     --dkg

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