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

[Johannes Merkle <[e-mail]>]

> 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.


-- 
Johannes