Subject: Re: [secdir] secdir review of draft-sakane-dhc-dhcpv6-kdc-option

From: t.p. <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2012 15:24:10 +0100

----- Original Message -----
From: "ssakane" <[email-masked]>
To: "t.p." <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>;
<[email-masked]>; "ietf" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2012 2:29 PM
> Hi Tom,
>
> Some reviewers suggested me to just remove the figure and its
description in
> 4.1 because it has ambiguity.  I think it would be better to leave the
1st
> paragraph in section 4.1, and I should remove the rest.  What do you
think
> about this idea ?

I would leave it in.

The first paragraph on its own I would think underspecified and the rest
of the section does cover a number of issues, issues that only occurred
to me when I read the section carefully.  As I said in my last post, I
then found I had further issues - how long to wait, should a secure DHCP
trump an insecure DNS? - which may be worth exploring in addition.

I do think that this kind of pseudocode helps a lot of developers to
understand the issues and would want a good reason to remove it; at the
same time, others see it as an impurity that has no part in a Standards
Track RFC.  One option would be to remove it to an Appendix which
implicitly makes it Informative and not Normative so it is there for
those who would benefit from it but will not upset those who consider it
out of place.  But I would bounce this off the krb list to see what
reaction you get.

Tom Petch

> Thanks,
> Shoichi
>
> On 6/8/12 7:37 PM, "t.p." <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> > Just to make public what I have hinted at privately, I think that
steps
> > in section 4.1 may be somewhat underspecified.
> >
> > They give the logic a client, one which supports both DHCP and DNS,
> > should
> > follow in order to find a KDC, with DNS information being preferred.
> > One scenario outlined in section 1 is of a user having entered
userid
> > and
> > passphrase and waiting to be authenticated.  The steps imply a
number of
> > timeouts in succession without specifying what balance to take of
how
> > long
> > to wait for a server to respond versus how long to keep the user
> > waiting.
> > I would find it difficult to know what balance to strike without
> > guidance.
> >
> > A related issue is that section 4.1 prefers DNS to DHCP for Kerberos
> > information but the Security Considerations stress the weakness of
> > DHCP and recommend authenticating DHCP.  What if DHCP is secure
> > and DNS is not?  Should DNS still be preferred?
> >
> > Tom Petch
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Jeffrey Hutzelman" <[email-masked]>
> > To: "Samuel Weiler" <[email-masked]>
> > Cc: <[email-masked]>;
> > <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
> > Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2012 6:50 PM
> > Subject: Re: [secdir] secdir review of
> > draft-sakane-dhc-dhcpv6-kdc-option
> >
> >
> >
>
>

---

From: t.p. <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2012 08:17:02 +0100

---- Original Message -----
From: "ssakane" <[email-masked]>
To: "t.p." <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>;
<[email-masked]>; "ietf" <[email-masked]>
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2012 1:55 AM
> Removing the section 4.1 to an Appendix is nicer idea rather than just
> deleting it.

Yes, but for me it is definitely second best.

Arguably, following the steps in s 4.1 is necessary for
interoperability.

If DNS and DHCP produce the same KDC information, who cares what
procedure is followed?  It is only when they produce different results
that the procedure matters.

The dictum is that DNS information is preferred to DHCP information, but
as the procedure shows, it is not quite that simple.  It specifies that
DNS is accessed via DHCP, ie DNS is only accessed if DHCP provides
information about it.  Without this guidance, an implementer might
assume that eg preconfigured DNS information should be used to access
DNS for KDC information rather than first asking DHCP for what it knows,
in which case such an implementer would follow a different path to,
potentially, a different KDC.  So the client uses one KDC, the
application server a different KDC; result, protocol failure.

So you could see s 4.1 as necessary for the protocol to work.

And again, as I said before, s 4.1 says that DNS SHOULD be used, while
the Security Considerations say DHCP SHOULD be secured so given secure
DHCP and insecure DNS giving different results, which SHOULD wins?

Tom Petch
>
> Shoichi
>
>
> On 6/8/12 11:24 PM, "t.p." <[email-masked]> wrote:
>