Re: [secdir] secdir review of draft-housley-suite-b-to-historic-04

[Paul Wouters <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 24 Apr 2018, Taylor Yu wrote:

> "7.  Security Considerations
>
>   The CNSA Suite includes algorithms using the larger key sizes that
>   are included in Suite B.  There are no interoperability or security
>   concerns raised by reclassifying the Suite-B-related RFCs to Historic
>   Status."

This text is interesting as I see two statements by the US government
on the CNSA Suite.

The first one is at:

https://www.iad.gov/iad/programs/iad-initiatives/cnsa-suite.cfm

Which claims the CNSA Suite is not published yet, but there is a
transition set of algorithms to use.

The second one is at:

https://www.iad.gov/iad/library/ia-guidance/ia-solutions-for-classified/algorithm-guidance/cnsa-suite-and-quantum-computing-faq.cfm

Which lists the same algorithms, but no longer calls these a transition
list but the actual CNSA Suite.

Regardless, since I think the IETF should not be advertising a single
governments crypto standards, I think this document would be better of
not mentioning CNSA in Section 7 at all. We shouldn't have stamped Suite B
in the IETF either, but we were young and naive at the time. So let's
not stamp CNSA as a "successor" in any kind of way. The only thing this
document should do is move Suite B to Historic.

I would suggest something like this for Section 7:

 	The algorithms and key sizes from Suite B, where these algorithms
 	and key sizes were published by the IETF, have been obsoleted or
 	updated by new and more secure algorithms and key sizes. Please
 	see the respective IANA registries and RFC updates for the
 	specific algorithm usage within their specific protocols.

I'm fine with mentioning CNSA in Section 2.

Paul