I therefore request that these inappropriate changes in terminology
be backed out again. "Port number obfuscation" is a serious
misnomer; port numbers still are transmitted in the clear under the
methods presented in this draft; so "port number randomization" or,
for short, "port randomization" is the proper term -- and it is
widely adopted by the community since several years.
I dunno exactly why we're still talking about this it seems a little
late in the game to worry about the nitty gritty of terminology. The WG
had its consensus and passed this document along.
Alfred is right that "obfuscate" is not be quite right (although I don't
think "serious misnomer" is even close to an appropriate
characterization), but "random" is not quite right either (some of these
algorithms just aren't).
I think this all comes down to the viewpoint you want to take and I
think Alfred is taking a different viewpoint than the document. If you
are viewing this as somehow hiding the port number from all parties
outside the involved end hosts then nothing in this document obfuscates
the port number at all, as Alfred notes (its still in the clear). On
the other hand, if you take the point of view of the document that this
offers a bit of protection against those that cannot see the packets but
can guess communication patterns and try to attack those then the
processes discussed in the document produce unpredictable ephemeral port
numbers and therefore they are in fact 'obfuscated' to such blind
attackers.
I would personally just leave the obfuscation language as I think it is
more correct than the 'random' language and this has made it through the
WG and ultimately what we call it isn't as important as people using it.
This seems a minor point. We don't have unanimous agreement, but
OK...we live with rough consensus.
Another path might be to re-phrase everything as 'unpredictable' ports.
As I sit here I sorta wish I had thought of that long ago as that
strikes me as a bit more correct than 'obfuscate' and certainly more
than 'random'.
But, really, its a minor point. Lets just someone decide and be done.
allman
pgp3gB3Z7rvxF.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf