Subject: [anonsec] Comments on applicability statement

From: hartmans-ietf at mit.edu (Sam Hartman)
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2005 21:30:28 -0400 (EDT)

Overall I think the document is fairly good.  I do have a few comments
I am submitting as an individual.

Large concerns:

Section 3.  Please sjeparate the applicability statement for SAB and
CBB even if you need to duplicate text.  I think this will make it
much cleaner to evaluate when considering whether protocols meet the
applicability statement.

I don't tend to agree with the assertion that IKE is stronger than
CBB.  That depends entirely on what's going on; I can think of
situations where CBB is stronger and situations where IKE is stronger.

I don't understand how s-cbb has anything to do with self-signed certs
and websites.

I actually don't understand how https is similar to cbb at all in that
there is no channel binding.

I'm not sure that section 3.1 makes a good applicability statement.
In particular, it does not easily answer the two questions I would
expect from an applicability statement.  As an operator considering
deploying BTNS, is BTNS appropriate for my use case.  As a protocol
designer considering relying on BTNS, is BTNS appropriate for my
needs?  I wonder whether we really need to break out all the
asymmetric cases.  Instead I think it might be useful to focus on the
capabilities of a peer.  That way you would need to describe when it
is acceptable to set up an association with an anonymous peer (SAB
applicability statement) and when it is acceptable to set up an
association to a peer you will bind at a higher layer (CBB
applicability statement).

Section 4 seems to duplicate a lot of the content I would expect to see in section 3.

Section 5.3 .  I think ssh is a better example for leap of faith than
ssl.  Section 5.3 should either rule this extension in scope or out of
scope.  Currently it just mentions the extension but takes no
position.

A bunch of small things:

TLS not SSL in description of https.

In section 1.1 it seems odd to say that we use IPsec both because it is widely deployed and is facing deployment challenges.

I don't understand why the definition of CBB and SAB belongs in 1.1;
it seems like we want a section break between the assumptions and the
description of the two modes of operation.

Please cite a definition for DOS, DDOS and flash crowd.