[TLS] call for consensus: changes to IANA registry rules for cipher suites

[Sean Turner <[e-mail]>]

Hi!

In Yokohama, we discussed changing the IANA registry assignment rules for cipher suites to allow anyone with a stable, publicly available, peer reviewed reference document to request and get a code point and to add an “IETF Recommended” column to the registry.  This change is motivated by the large # of requests received for code points [0], the need to alter the incorrect perception that getting a code point somehow legitimizes the suite/algorithm, and to help implementers out.  We need to determine whether we have consensus on this plan, which follows:

1. The IANA registry rules for the TLS cipher suite registry [1] will be changed to specification required.

2. A new “IETF Recommended” column will be added with two values: “Y” or “N”.  Y and N have the following meaning:

 Cipher suites marked with a “Y” the IETF has consensus on
 and are reasonably expected to be supported by widely
 used implementations such as open-source libraries.  The
 IETF takes no position on the cipher suites marked with an
 “N”.  Not IETF recommended does not necessarily (but can)
 mean that the ciphers are not cryptographically sound (i.e.,
 are bad).  Cipher suites can be recategorized from N to Y
 (e.g., Curve448) and vice versa.

3. We will add a “Note" to the IANA registry itself (i.e., on [0]) that matches the above so that the same information is available to those who don’t read the IANA considerations section of the RFC.

Please indicate whether or not you could support this plan.

Thanks,

J&S

[0] In the last year, the chairs have received requests for:

PSK: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mattsson-tls-ecdhe-psk-aead/
AES-OCB: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-zauner-tls-aes-ocb-03.txt
Kcipher2: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-kiyomoto-kcipher2-tls/
dragonfly: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-pwd/
NTRU:  http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-whyte-qsh-tls12-01.txt
JPAKE: not sure they got around to publishing a draft.

[1] https://www.iana.org/assignments/tls-parameters/tls-parameters.xhtml#tls-parameters-4