Subject: [secdir] secdir review of draft-seokung-msec-mikey-seed-02

From: Samuel Weiler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:50:59 +0100 (BST)

I have reviewed this document as part of the security directorate's 
ongoing effort to review all IETF documents being processed by the 
IESG.  These comments were written primarily for the benefit of the 
security area directors.  Document editors and WG chairs should treat 
these comments just like any other last call comments.

I see no problems with this draft -- it adds a few entries to IANA 
registries that have an assignment metric of IETF Consensus.  It has a 
dependency on a draft that was on telechat in June; all Discuss 
positions on that doc have been cleared.

The only questions I might ask are really out of scope: 1) does MIKEY 
deal with algoritm agility gracefully (e.g. is it subject to downgrade 
or DOS attacks)?  But that's out of scope for this review and this 
document.

And... 2) for the fields being changed (and others), 3830 says "a one 
byte length is enough" and establishes an IANA registry for the values 
0-255, but those fields appear to be encoded on the wire using a TLV 
scheme.  I have fear of future interop issues if some implementations 
hardcode the one byte length, and the text in 3830 makes it pretty 
clear that hardcoding would be justified.  But, again, that's beyond 
the scope of this draft to fix.

-- Sam