[Uta] Barry Leiba's Discuss on draft-ietf-uta-xmpp-06: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)
"Barry Leiba" <barryleiba@computer.org> Mon, 20 April 2015 21:55 UTC
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From: Barry Leiba <barryleiba@computer.org>
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Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2015 14:55:50 -0700
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Subject: [Uta] Barry Leiba's Discuss on draft-ietf-uta-xmpp-06: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)
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Barry Leiba has entered the following ballot position for draft-ietf-uta-xmpp-06: Discuss When responding, please keep the subject line intact and reply to all email addresses included in the To and CC lines. (Feel free to cut this introductory paragraph, however.) Please refer to http://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/discuss-criteria.html for more information about IESG DISCUSS and COMMENT positions. The document, along with other ballot positions, can be found here: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-uta-xmpp/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DISCUSS: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- I forgot to put this in on my first ballot: You have a downref to RFC 4949, and it wasn't called out in the last call message. We'll have to do a second last call in order to comply with RFC 3967 (BCP 97). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMENT: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Section 3.4 -- Wherever possible, it is best to prefer authenticated connections (along with SASL [RFC4422]), as already stated in the core XMPP specification [RFC6120]. In particular, clients MUST authenticate servers and servers MUST authenticate clients. How does "prefer" "whenever possible" match up with "MUST" and "MUST"? Ah, I see; in the next paragraph, we have server-to-server authentication, which isn't a MUST. Got it. So, purely optional if you agree with me, but I'd find it less confusing like this: NEW Wherever possible, it is best to prefer authenticated connections (along with SASL [RFC4422]), as already stated in the core XMPP specification [RFC6120]. In particular: * Clients MUST authenticate servers. * Servers MUST authenticate clients. * Servers SHOULD authenticate other servers. This document does not mandate that servers need to authenticate peer servers, although such authentication is strongly preferred. Unfortunately, [...etc...] END -- Section 3.6 -- I understand that, while most users won't understand it, there's value in trying to communicate to an end user that she is using a secure connection. I am very skeptical that there's the slightest bit of value in giving end users information about the version of TLS used, the mechanism for verification, the details of the certs (if any), or the details of the cipher suite. I'm certainly skeptical that making that available to end users should rise to the level of "strongly encouraged". I'm not going to block anything with regard to this, but I see this as something you might strongly encourage be available to an administrator, but not to an end user (other than, perhaps, by enabling detailed logging through an advanced setting, then inspecting the logs).