Subject: [secdir] Secdir review of draft-ietf-appsawg-text-markdown-use-cases

From: Paul Wouters <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2015 18:15:10 -0400 (EDT)

I have reviewed this document as part of the security directorate's
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 comment.

This document describes use cases and sometimes existing deployed code
on handling "markdown" text. As such, the document introduces no new
security considerations, and the Security Considerations section points
to other documents that further document the respective markdown
variants and their own security considerations.

Recommendation:  Ready with Issues

I wanted to point out two use cases (or existing deployed code?)
that uses some features that might be considered a security issue.

2.1 talks about filesystem "extended attributes" and suggests to add a
     resource named "variant". This name might be a little too generic to
     only apply to markdown and might cause a name spaec collision that
     could potentially be a security risk. If this is a use case without
     deployed code, I would recommend renaming this resource to something
     more specific, eg "markdown-varient". If it describes actual code,
     then I guess that ship has sailed.

2.4 talks about MIME aware clients saving a "batch script" to disk for
     later execution. These kind of "autorun" or "preview" features are
     a security nightmare, so here too I would hope this has not yet been
     coded. And if not, to reconsider not supporting such a feature.

Paul