Subject: [tram] Benoit Claise's No Objection on draft-ietf-tram-stun-origin-05: (with COMMENT)

From: "Benoit Claise" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 May 2015 06:36:07 -0700

Benoit Claise has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-tram-stun-origin-05: No Objection

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COMMENT:
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Here is Tim Chown's OPS DIR review, along the same lines as Stephen and
Alissa's DISCUSSES.
The feedback was sent to the authors on April 22nd, and I have not seen
any reply so far.

Hi,

I have reviewed this document as part of the Operational directorate's
ongoing effort to review all IETF documents being processed by the IESG. 
These comments were written with the intent of improving the operational
aspects of the IETF drafts. Comments that are not addressed in last call
may be included in AD reviews during the IESG review.  Document editors
and WG chairs should treat these comments just like any other last call
comments. 

I would summarise this document as being Not Ready.

My concern with the draft lies with privacy aspects. While the area is
not one that I am particularly familiar with, but there would seem to be
additional potential exposure through this method, and the language of
the draft seems at odds with the language in RFC6454 (Section 7.3). I
would therefore urge the AD to review this aspect, and to determine
whether the utility of the draft outweighs the privacy concerns, and if
it does, that appropriate privacy ‘knobs’ are included for those who are
‘privacy-sensitive’ (in the language of RFC6454).

I think the rationale and tradeoffs could be more clearly stated in the
document. With recent passive pervasive monitoring threats, the IETF is
now supposed to be considering whether  given information *needs* to be
transmitted in any given protocol.

Would I as a user, for example, be able to toggle a setting that would
mean my ORIGIN would always be “null”, as per RFC6454 section 7.3? Is the
use of ORIGIN *required*, or is it just ‘desirable’? Would my application
fail, or not? It appears from Section 1 that its inclusion is ‘useful’,
but not required.

Section 4 talks of TLS for avoiding eavesdropping of ORIGIN in STUN
messages, but the privacy concern is not necessarily only with
transmission of the information. I think here paragraph 3 of Section 4 is
at odds with RFC6454 Section 7.3 - with this draft saying MAY wrt use of
a “null” Origin, and RFC6454 saying MUST for use of “null”. The same
applies to the end of the last paragraph in Section 4 as well.

The draft should probably use the ‘privacy-senstive’ context terminology
of RFC6454, as per Section 7.3, and describe how the user can influence
the privacy settings where they which to maximise their privacy.

Tim

=====================================================
A point of detail, really, if you update the draft.

   For a web application provider STUN or TURN server, the
   server will have no idea which web pages or sites are sending binding
   requests to the service.  In conventional applications, the SOFTWARE
   attribute would provide some identifying information to the service,
   but that no longer works when the browser is the application.

SOFTWARE attribute: a reference to
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5389#section-15.10 would be beneficial