Subject: Protection of success/failure indication.

From: "Mohan Parthasarathy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 11:31:57 -0700

Hello,

draft-ietf-pana-threats-eval draft requires that success/failure packets
MUST
be protected.

In the context of EAP, the above could be interpreted to be either the 
EAP success/failure or it could even be the EAP method success/failure.
In my
understadning, rfc2284-bis itself does not talk about method specific
success/failure. With a recent clarification in the EAP working group,
it was
decided that only in re-authentication, the EAP success/failure packet
can be
protected.

It might be a bit odd to write down the requirements based on what EAP
does
as the draft was supposed to be more general in nature. If you think
about
this in general, it is not possible to protect the success/failure
packet
always as it requires some key derivation beforehand and it can always
fail before the key derivation happens.

So, the requirement can be modified to say that "The success/failure
messages
SHOULD be protected where possible" with some explanatory text as
described
above.

Comments ?

-mohan

---

From: Alper Yegin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 May 2003 14:28:59 -0700

> SHOULD be protected where possible" with some explanatory text as

I agree. Not all authentication methods can produce crypto keys, hence
saying "result MUST be protected" is too strong. Not all environments need
this kind of security anyways....

Alper