Re: [secdir] secdir review of draft-ietf-alto-protocol

["Dan Harkins" <[e-mail]>]

  Hi Richard,

On Mon, February 17, 2014 1:46 pm, Richard Alimi wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 6:38 AM, Dan Harkins <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>>
>>   Hi RIchard,
>>
>> On Sun, February 9, 2014 11:03 pm, Richard Alimi wrote:
>> > On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 7:08 PM, Dan Harkins <[e-mail]>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >>
>> >> On Sun, February 2, 2014 11:33 am, Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
>> >> > On Sat, 2014-02-01 at 10:54 -0800, Dan Harkins wrote:
>> >> >
>> >> >>  Also, given those
>> >> >>      restrictions and the fact that a tag just has to be less than
>> >> >>      or equal to 64 octets, the probability of identical tags
>> being
>> >> >>      used is not zero. I think the probability of the tag from
>> >> >>      example 11.3.1.7 is 0.5 to collide with one of just 460
>> >> >>      other Network Maps.
>> >> >>
>> >> >>      I suggest requiring a tag to be 64 octets. That will make
>> >> >>      even money probability of collision among nearly 3000
>> >> >>      other Network Maps, which is safer.
>> >> >
>> >> > OK, maybe I'm confused and reading out of context here.  But I once
>> >> had
>> >> > someone tell me I needed to change my 5-character username because
>> >> they
>> >> > were requiring all usernames to be at least 6 characters, _in order
>> to
>> >> > increase the number of possible usernames_.  That is, they claimed
>> >> they
>> >> > were increasing the size of a namespace by eliminating possible
>> names.
>> >>
>> >>   Well that's a hair brained policy, but username selection is not a
>> >> good
>> >> analogy. I was at a company that had no strict requirements on a
>> >> username
>> >> so there should have been a near infinite size of the namespace. But
>> we
>> >> had
>> >> a collision when the company had less than 10 employees because there
>> >> was another "dan" at the company.
>> >>
>> >> > The point is, if a tag is required to be exactly 64 octets, you get
>> >> > 0x5e^64 possible tags.  But if it is required to be up to 64
>> octets,
>> >> you
>> >> > get Sum(i=0..64) 0x5e^i possible tags, which is strictly greater
>> than
>> >> > 0x5e^64.  So, requiring a tag to be 64 octets _reduces_ the number
>> of
>> >> > possible tags, thereby increasing the chance of collision.
>> >>
>> >>   That would be the case if all tags in the Sum(i=1..64) 0x5e^i
>> tagspace
>> >> were equally probable of being chosen. Which implies implementations
>> >> choosing a random tag length for each tag generated in addition to a
>> >> random tag selection scheme for the randomly chosen length. I
>> suspect,
>> >> though, that in practice the tag length will be fixed for a
>> particular
>> >> implementation and the tag selection scheme will not necessarily be
>> >> random. So the herd mentality, plus the proliferation of one or two
>> >> companies' ALTO servers, will result in a severely reduced size of
>> the
>> >> effective tagspace and the increased possibility of collisions.
>> >>
>> >>   A tag generated as SHA256(NetworkMap) represented in 64 hex
>> >> characters would basically guarantee you'd never have a collision.
>> >> Saying, "it can be anything you want as long as it's less than 64
>> >> octets" would not.
>> >>
>> >
>> > Should I interpret your comment to say that we should to require
>> > particular
>> > mechanisms for generating version tags, or be more explicit about
>> > suggesting mechanisms that have a low collision probability?
>>
>>   Yes, I think you should. Suggestions on how to ensure a low
>> probability of collision would be helpful.
>>
>
> We've added the following text to section 10.3:
>
> It is RECOMMENDED that the tag have a low collision probability with other
> tags. One suggested mechanism is to compute it using a hash of the data
> content of the resource.

  That sounds great!

>>
>> > To help steer readers towards better implementation practices, we'll
>> > change
>> > the examples to use hashes in the version tags.
>>
>>   That's a great idea. So people who implement ALTO and check
>> the example will use hashes themselves and that will help ensure
>> a low probability of collision.
>>
>
> This change has been made to our copy in SVN.

  Fantastic. Thank you very much for your resolution to my comments.

  Dan.

>>
>> > Thank you again for the review!
>>
>>   You're very welcome!
>>
>>   regards,
>>
>>   Dan.
>>
>>
>>
>