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draft-ietf-smime-3850bis-06 rqmts inconsistency

2008-09-26 13:41:42

Folks,
after a couple of draft revisions, I have undertaken a new
review the latest S/MIME v3.2 Cert Handling draft,
    draft-ietf-smime-3850bis-06.

The (very few) editorial issues I found have been communicated
off-list to the authors.

The single technical issue I found concerns Section 4.3
(and the related security considerations):

The last lines in 4.3 , ...

+  The following are the DSA key size requirements for S/MIME receiving
+  agents during certificate and CRL signature verification:
+
+   512 <= key size <= 1024 : MAY  (see Section 6)

... are not reasonable, since in the first part of the section,
'DSA with SHA-256' is listed as SHOULD+, and 'DSA with SHA-1'
is listed as SHOULD- .

If there are SHOULD requirements for DSA, then at least one
key size for DSA needs to have at least the same requirements
level, isn't it?

This topic has a related discussion in the Security
Considerations of the draft, the penultimate paragraph of Sec 6,
which seems to be outdated by FIPS 186-3.

It looks like the shift in the Ref. from 186-2 to 186-3 has
introduced inconsistencies into the draft.

So what are the proper requirements to be posed for supported
DSA key size?  (That's 'L' in FIPS 186-3, isn't it?)

Please take Section 4.2 of FIPS 186-3 into consideration;
there, key sizes L of 1024, 2048, and 3072 are specified.


Kind regards,
  Alfred.

-- 

+------------------------+--------------------------------------------+
| TR-Sys Alfred Hoenes   |  Alfred Hoenes   Dipl.-Math., Dipl.-Phys.  |
| Gerlinger Strasse 12   |  Phone: (+49)7156/9635-0, Fax: -18         |
| D-71254  Ditzingen     |  E-Mail:  ah(_at_)TR-Sys(_dot_)de                    
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