Re: [secdir] [Cfrg] Time to recharter CFRG as a working group? Was: Re: ISE seeks help with some crypto drafts

[Peter Gutmann <[e-mail]>]

Tero Kivinen <[e-mail]> writes:

>Secsh WG was active between 1997-2006. The filexfer-02 was published in 2001
>and final filexfer-13 was published in 2006, i.e., the -13 version is what
>the working group was working on. My understanding was that the issue was
>that openssh did not want to implement what was specified in the working
>group because of the issues with trademarks, personalities and things not at
>all relevant to the actual protocol development or IETF work.

I think it was more than just that, if you look at what you'd need to do for
an -02 client, so "General Packet Format" to the end of "Requests From the
Client to the Server" that's fifteen pages.  In -13 the same thing is forty-
two pages (!!), and also draws in chunks of NFSv4 by reference.  It's gone
from being a means of getting a file from A to B to trying to reinvent NFS,
with all the attendant complexity.

I can see why an implementer would want to stop at -02, which is exactly what
I did when I had to do an SFTP implementation, -13 had reached the point where
it was growing without bounds with little to no benefit from the massive
complexity being added to it.

Peter.