Subject: [Cfrg] Where's the beef?

From: Alex Alten <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 10:36:43 -0700

Hello Ran & David,

OK. I subscribed to this list a few weeks ago and have been lurking
on it.  What exactly is its purpose?  Is it just going to be another
crypto shop talk list, albeit with an IETF twist?  

Do you have a budget to do serious stuff?  

The only thing going for it so far is that I don't get a lot of
email from it.  

Regards, but still hungry,

- Alex

--

Alex Alten
[email-masked]

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From: "David A. Mcgrew" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 10:58:08 -0700

Alex,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alex Alten [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Friday, August 30, 2002 10:37 AM
> To: Ran Canetti; David A. Mcgrew
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Where's the beef?
>
>
> Hello Ran & David,
>

Thanks for your interest.  While the email list may be useful for shop talk,
as an IRTF RG we can have Internet Drafts and produce Informational RFCs.
So we can certainly go beyond chat and document things of importance to the
IETF.

> Do you have a budget to do serious stuff?

What do you have in mind?  Is there something that you'd like to see
discussed or reviewed?

> The only thing going for it so far is that I don't get a lot of

I'm happy with the signal-to-noise ratio so far :-)

David

---

From: Alex Alten <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 11:50:17 -0700

>What do you have in mind?  Is there something that you'd like to see

You side-stepped my budget question.  So I assume no money is available.
This is a pity, because the best minds in the crypto world will not work
for free, unlike the usual university or corporate lab network programmer
in an IETF WG.  This will make it difficult to produce anything useful
here.  As a practical matter we will need to back up our RFC's with
outside analysis.  This can be costly (although I suppose we would get
discounts).

Good luck (raising cash),

- Alex

--

Alex Alten
[email-masked]

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From: "David A. Mcgrew" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 12:39:40 -0700

Alex,

> Sent: Friday, August 30, 2002 11:50 AM
> To: David A. Mcgrew
> Cc: [email-masked]; Ran Canetti
> Subject: RE: Where's the beef?
>
>

this is the IRTF.  If you're expecting us to solicit or disburse money, I'm
afraid that you'll be disappointed.  If you're unfamiliar with the IRTF, the
guidelines and procedures are outlined in RFC 2014.

> outside analysis.

The idea of CFRG is that the RG members can provide this kind of review, and
that the results of crypto analysis relevant to the Internet can be
disseminated and discussed.

David

> This can be costly (although I suppose we would get
> discounts).
>

---

From: [email-masked] (David Wagner)
Date: 30 Aug 2002 19:44:45 GMT

Alex Alten  wrote:
>for free, [...]

You're wrong.

---

From: Alex Alten <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 13:05:41 -0700

David,

>guidelines and procedures are outlined in RFC 2014.

I am unfamiliar with it.  Let me read it before getting back to you.

And to answer an earlier question, yes I do have something in mind but
I hesitate.

>disseminated and discussed.

No.  I disagree.  Anything serious must go through very thorough "private"
review first.  You cannot put stuff out publicly until you are sure it 
will fly from a crypto/security point of view.  Otherwise you will damage
our reputation to the point that you might as well disband.

To me "private" means we have the best cryptanalysts possible review our
RFCs before we put them out for public review (say a couple of months 
before first call).  Unless the various RG members have the credentials
(only 2-3 are probably needed per type of RFC) AND are willing to sign
the review, you *will* have to pay for this type of review, and it is not
cheap (although the best are not the most expensive).  In any case it is
good professional form to have neutral 3rd parties review them, our RG
members will probably develop biases while working on or discussing a
technology/RFC.

- Alex

--

Alex Alten
[email-masked]

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From: Jim Hughes <[email-masked]>
Date: 30 Aug 2002 16:20:19 -0500

au contraire, mon ami. 

The best way to get the best minds to look at the problem for free is to
write a bad standard. 

The fame for breaking a standard (ala RC-4 and thus WEP, A5 and thus
GSM, CBC padding and thus SSL, IPSEC and WTLS) is very seductive to the
people that do this for a living. It is also very embarrassing and
humbling experience that I do not want to be a party to.  

What http://www.siswg.org has done is to pose a specific problem to the
crypto community so that the real cryptographers look at it. We have
been successful with a call for algorithms
http://www.cryptobroker.com/index.php?project=2 at getting several of
the top names in crypto modes to look at the problem for free, and we
also hope that they will come and present at a large workshop
http://www.ieee-tfia.org/sisw2002/index.html. We hope to standardize at
least one of the solutions.

By stating the problem in more cryptographic terms so that an algorithm
can be found (if it exists) or built, and by casting a wide net, I
believe will result in a better outcome than the usual committee
approach.

[email-masked] is nice and it will bring added light on the process and
help a group be sure they are not making a real bonehead move, but a
review by this list not be enough to have caught the RC-4, A5 or CBC
weaknesses. The review may have resulted in opinions that "I would not
have done it this way" but I doubt that in these cases that these
opinions would have swayed the committee away from their "decision". I
doubt if paying people to do the research will provide anything more
than similar opinions and committees with similar final (non) decisions.

I believe a better way is to try to educate the committees on how to
engage the crypto community before they get their feet cemented in a
particular solution, and if we can do this, then this will be a valuable
result.

Thanks. 

jim

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From: Alex Alten <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2002 13:55:19 -0700

>>This is a pity, because the best minds in the crypto world will not work

I stand corrected by one of those minds.  :-}.
(This is said with all due respect for your considerable talent.)

I had a conversation with Peter Schweitzer about this last year, whom
I consider damn near the best cryptanalyst in the USA, and I'm fairly
sure he does not ever work for free.

He was pretty adamant about doing things step by step before publicly
publishing something.  Doing good analysis is hard work.  This is not
like publishing an analysis of something like WEP or SSL where you
could get great mileage out of the resulting publicity.  I'm talking
about doing this sort of work before publishing it.  The closest free
thing I can think of is the Twofish effort for NIST's AES.  But, again
there was prestige to be gained by the team for publishing even a runner
up design.  Here, most likely, a lot of RFCs will be rather obscure,
tucked away in some reference slot in a Standard RFC.  Are you willing
to do this heavy lifting, not for just one informational RFC, but say a
dozen or more?

I've been on the engineering side of the world too long.  I guess I
don't have the right mindset for IRTF.

- Alex

--

Alex Alten
[email-masked]