On 12/3/2013 11:45 PM, Jari Arkko wrote:
I wanted to draw your attention on this last call:
The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider
the following document:
- 'Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack'
<draft-farrell-perpass-attack-02.txt> as Best Current Practice
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-farrell-perpass-attack/
It is a short read and important, so please comment. The last call ends in
four weeks and covers holiday time, but we'll deal with this document on the
January 9th telechat in the IESG, so in practice there should be enough time
to comment.
I would like to see this document as a high-level policy we have on dealing
with this particular type of vulnerabilities in the Internet. A little bit
like RFC 3365 "Danvers Doctrine" was on weak vs. strong security. Please
remember that the details and tradeoffs for specific solutions are for our
WGs to consider and not spelled out here. The draft does say "where possible"
- I do not want to give the impression that our technology can either fully
prevent all vulnerabilities or do it in all situations. There are obviously
aspects that do not relate to communications security (like access to content
by your peer) and there are many practical considerations that may not make
it possible to provide additional privacy protection even when we are talking
about the communications part. But I do believe we need to consider these
vulnerabilities and do our best.
It is good to have the consensus recorded in a document like this,
but I think the current draft is too vague to be usefully cited
and not just abused as a club against ourselves in the future.
If it's worth making a BCP on this, then it's worth beefing up
to be more specific about what it means and what context it's
coming from.
I believe it should have at least a couple clear examples of:
- mechanisms that have been (or can be) used as mitigations
- examples of instances and general cases where incorporating
mitigations is not a concern
I suggest both of these because I don't want to imagine many
reviews later on that say "you forgot to deal with pervasive
monitoring in the $FOO protocol", when there may not even be
good technical mechanisms available to deal with it, and/or
it may not even be applicable for the $FOO protocol.
For instance, this BCP shouldn't be able to be misinterpreted
to imply that all protocols need to implement their own crypto,
nor that they have mandatory incorporation of TLS, or anything
like that.
The "where possible" in the abstract and 2nd paragraph of section 2,
should be more like "where it is possible, important for the use cases
of the protocol, and reasonable to implement and operate such
mechanisms". The simple "where possible" doesn't seem like much of
a limitation or escape clause to me ... just about anything is
_possible_, but it may not always make sense.
As an example, would we expect MPLS to do anything about
pervasive monitoring or can new MPLS extensions keep moving
through the IETF without heeding to this BCP?
It's also not clear to me whether it's intended to only apply
to protocol behavior "on the wire" or also to logging behaviors,
log formats, and other privacy-defeating factors of implementations.
It specifically says that this is about privacy, and that requires a
lot more than just wire protocol work in order to create. I think
it would be good to mention these aspects, if this as a BCP will
really be referenced by the community in the future.
--
Wes Eddy
MTI Systems