Scott,
I'll leave it to you, Ted, and your IESG colleagues to figure
out what priority this has, but it seems to me that this topic
is, at some point, worth some serious discussion. If the
security community has really concluded that authentication
without encryption is no longer acceptable --and it certainly
sounds that way from the discussions of the last week, put into
context by Christian's explanation-- then we have a task in
front of us to start upgrading or deprecating almost every
application protocol we have, back to and including Telnet.
Conversely, it seems to me that an alternate recommendation
would be "don't even bother thinking about running applications
on the public Internet except over encrypted tunnels that
provide both privacy and server authentication". If we are
headed that way, and believe that advice will be followed, then
perhaps the issues and requirements for individual applications
actually get less stringent than what we've been trying to
insist on for the last several years.
My only strong opinions about this are that some serious,
carefully-explained and consensus-based guidance is in order
here and that it should apply, to the extent possible, across
the applications space rather than being developed by picking at
particular sentences in particular proposed-for-standards-track
documents.
And, coming back to my initial note to Sam on the original
thread, I think that, if we propose to impose much stronger
requirements, we need to be careful about explanations and
education, lest the marketplace respond by saying "too hard",
"can't be deployed at plausible cost", "the users will just
click 'yes' when the warnings come up and get irritated in the
process", or "lousy user experience" and then ignore whatever
recommendations we have made.
best,
john
--On Saturday, 11 June, 2005 11:32 -0400 Scott Hollenbeck
<sah(_at_)428cobrajet(_dot_)net> wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: John C Klensin [mailto:john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com]
Sent: Saturday, June 11, 2005 10:57 AM
To: Christian Huitema; Brian E Carpenter; Keith Moore
Cc: iesg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org; Dave Crocker; ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Client and server authentication for email (was: RE:
Last Call: 'Email Submission Between Independent Networks' to
BCP)
[snip]
It may be just my ignorance, but this does raise, for me,
some additional issues. Perhaps they should be put on the
agenda for discussion in the Apps Area meeting (assuming on
is held) in Paris, since this impacts not just email but just
about every application we have:
[snip]
An apparea meeting is planned, but due to the change in
meeting structure we've asked to have it scheduled for a
one-hour slot on Monday. Ted and I are open to having a
discussion topic if someone is willing to lead the discussion.
-Scott-
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