Re: [TLS] Call for Consensus: ECC on standards track

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 10:34 PM, Martin Rex <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Eric Rescorla wrote:
> > On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 8:45 PM, Martin Rex <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >
> > > Sean Turner wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Based on the mailing list discussion, the chairs believe that there
> is
> > > > strong support to publish TLS ECC Cipher Suites on the Standards
> > > > Track
> > > >
> > > > - Should we include TLS ECC Cipher Suites for AES-GCM
> > > >   directly in the TLS 1.3 document (and hence on the Standards
> Track).
> > >
> > > You would have to move the whole ECC for TLS stuff to standards track
> > > before thinking about adding any cipher suites that depend on this
> > > into the base TLS spec
> >
> > Unless I am missing something, RFC 3967 permits normative references
> > from Standards Track RFCs to Informational RFCs, provided that those
> > issues are called out in IETF LC. So, I believe we could simply refer to
> > 4492 from TLS 1.3 provided we follow the RFC 3967 Section 3.
>
> The copy of rfc3967 that I'm just looking at contains the following
> exclusion
> (last paragraph of Section 3):
>
>    This procedure should not be used if the proper step is to move the
>    document to which the reference is being made into the appropriate
>    category.  It is not intended as an easy way out of normal process.
>    Rather, the procedure is intended for dealing with specific cases
>    where putting particular documents into the required category is
>    problematic and unlikely ever to happen


Yes, I have read that as well, but as a practical matter, we have done
normative downrefs to documents which in principle could have
been uplifted but in practice are not going to be, See, for instance
the case of 2818:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc2818/referencedby/

Also, see:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4897


However, as I said in my previous response, we can also publish
standards track documents which describe ECC without referring
to 4492, so I don't think this is really a problem procedurally if
the WG decides that what it wants is for ECC to be on the standards
track.

-Ekr