Subject: Summary of the SASL working group meeting

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2003 04:06:23 -0400

The SASL working group met on Tuesday for one hour.

The document editor of RFC 2222bis (Alexei) will publish a revision in
the first week of August at which point we will last call it.
The saslprep document is to be revised to include informational
mapping tables but is otherwise ready for last call.  New revision
is expected shortly after the meeting and the last call will follow
shortly after it is announced.

Working group participants who made comments during the plain or
anonymous last call need to make sure their comments are reflected in
the current document.  The document editor believes that the working
group is done with these two documents although we are not sending
them to the IESG at this time.

The working group decided that AES for digest-md5 will use random IVs
rather than counter mode.  Counter mode is harder to implement
correctly.

There is likely to be interest in making the RC4 cipher
mandatory-to-implement for implementations that support
confidentiality with digest-md5.  The RC4 cipher is interoperable with
existing implementations and  we did not find any problems during the
security review conducted after the last meeting.

Currently, neither integrity protection nor confidentiality is
mandatory-to-implement.  At least one participant said he would remove
digest-md5 support rather than implement integrity.  The argument is
that you can just use TLS.  However, if you just use TLS, you need to
depend on TLS to authenticate the server to the client or you have a
man-in-the-mdille problem.  This will be discussed on the list.

The working group reached a consensus at the meeting to deprecate DES
and 3DES because they are insecure.

Larry submitted a 00 version of the GSSAPI draft, but it did not
appear.  He will resubmit in the near future.

Keith Burdis agreed to submit an SASL applicability statement as an
individual submission.  His document will include comparisons of the
various sasl mechanisms and their security properties. Sam agreed to
propose an outline for the document.  The working group will discuss
rechartering to include this document after the first revision.