[anonsec] comments on the BTNS core I-D
Derrell Piper
ddp at electric-loft.org
Mon Jul 30 09:26:51 PDT 2007
Overall:
'system' 'host' and 'node' are intermingled. 'node' in particular
implies
cluster to some of us and could easily be replaced with 'host' or
'system'.
You need to specify exactly what happens for every failure mode and
you ought
to be sending IKE informational or Notify payloads for all error cases.
Your bracketed notation is confusing. The brackets aren't adding
anything.
pg 3, third bullet
"...replaces the ID with into the new ID..." -> "...replaces the ID
with the new ID..."
pg 3, last paragraph
"These certificates need not to have been pre-shared with their peers
(e.g., because ephermal, self-signed)." ->
"These certificates do not need to be pre-shared with their peers and
may be ephemeral self-signed certificates."
I generally don't like the idea of sending self-signed certificates for
ephemeral keys. If the point is solely to maintain IKEv2 semantics, you
should say that. Otherwise, there's little reason to require the extra
overhead of the certificate processing (and parsing) when all you're
really
doing is extracting the public key anyway.
pg 6, Figure 1
"In this diagram, there are six end-nodes: A, B, C and D."
That's four, not six. Do you mean "...nodes: A, B, C, D, Q and R."?
"Node [D] has a non-fixed address." "non-fixed" meaning what
exactly? Why is that relevant?
pg 6, "The machine that we will care in this example is [SG-A]"
Grammar. "Let's first examine [SG-A], a firewall..."
pg 8, first bullet, maching PAD #3 but no Child SAs
Is there an IKE informational generated in this case? I think maybe you
should show exactly what you intend the IKE exchange to look like in
this
case.
pg 8, second bullet
"...a rogue BTNS nodes..." -> "...a rogue BTNS node..."
I'm not sure I understand what you mean here. If you're
authenticating on C's
address with BTNS, you're C. In essence, aren't all BTNS nodes rogue
nodes?
I think your use of the term 'rogue node' is confusing throughout
because
using it at all sort of implies that there's some protection when
there's not.
Alternatively, perhaps this whole discussion belongs in the Security
Considerations section.
pg 8, "...and it's NFSv4 implementation is..." -> "...and its..."
pg 8, "traffice" -> "traffic"
pg 9, "As [Q] has no formal relationship with [SG-B], rogues can
impersonate [B] (i.e., assert [B]'s addresses)."
You need to specify what should happen if a second [B] or [SG-B]
comes along.
pg. 11, Section 4.2
"If so, records the server's name..." is a sentence fragment.
pg. 11, "Leap of faith can work in a similar way for BTNS nodes, but
it is currently still being designed and specified b y the IETF BNTS
WG."
This statement is close to useless. Either say something substantive
or remove it.
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