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Re: [saag] Last Call: <draft-dukhovni-opportunistic-security-01.txt> (Opportunistic Security: some protection most of the time) to Informational RFC

2014-07-31 11:45:01

On Jul 30, 2014, at 1:15 PM, Stephen Kent <kent(_at_)bbn(_dot_)com> wrote:

Martin,
On 30 July 2014 08:54, Stephen Kent <kent(_at_)bbn(_dot_)com> wrote:
I would say:
"OS strives to greatly broaden the use of encryption in IETF protocols,
to combat PM. To facilitate incremental deployment, OS operates in
a fashion that may result in a plaintext connection/session."

That's a good description of OE, but wasn't the whole point of using
OS as the term to cover other opportunistic mechanisms, like maybe
opportunistic authentication (which I just invented, but I hope is
self-explanatory).

I don't think so.

Perhaps not, but it sounds a bit too binary for my taste. Without proposing an 
alternative (sorry!) I'd want it clearer that there may be an increasing number 
of multiple interoperable modes and a session should use the "best" one that 
can be agreed on.

As others have pointed out "best" may be ill-defined and you might need to 
trade e.g. better authentication against better encryption. I'm perfectly happy 
to leave the value function undefined, and I think we should be able to make 
the general principle clear.

Personal email.  hbhotz(_at_)oxy(_dot_)edu



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