Subject: [TICTOC] draft-ietf-tictoc-security-requirements - Proventication

From: Tal Mizrahi <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2012 17:03:35 +0300

Hi,

One of the main comments from draft 02 was to rephrase the proventication section.
I am suggesting the phrasing below. The word "proventication" will appear only once in the document (see the last sentence of the paragraph below).
If you have any comments, I will appreciate if you can send them this week.

4.1.2. Recursive Authentication of Masters (Chain of Trust)
Requirement
The security mechanism MUST support recursive authentication of the master, to be used in cases where end-to-end authentication is not possible.
Discussion
Clocks authenticate masters in order to ensure the authenticity of the time source.
In some cases a slave is connected to an intermediate master, that is not the primary time source. For example, in PTP a slave can be connected to a Boundary Clock (BC), which in turn is connected to a grandmaster. A similar example in NTP is when a client is connected to a stratum 2 server, which is connected to a stratum 1 server. In both the PTP and the NTP cases, the slave authenticates the intermediate master, and the intermediate master authenticates the primary master. This inductive authentication process is referred to in [AutoKey] as proventication.

Tal.