Subject: [TLS] Opsdir last call review of draft-ietf-tls-external-psk-guidance-03

From: Scott Bradner via Datatracker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2021 11:05:40 -0800

Reviewer: Scott Bradner
Review result: Has Nits

This is an OPS-DIR review of Guidance for External PSK Usage in TLS
<draft-ietf-tls-external-psk-guidance>.

As its title indicates, this ID provides guidance for the use of pre-shared
keys with TLS. Guidance documents are inherently useful to operations community
and this is no exception.

I found the document well written, slightly repetitive as Rich noted, but not
so much so as for it to be an issue for me.

A few notes though.

in section 4.2 the term PAKE is used without any definition – there is a
reference to a document but it seems to be that at least expanding the term in
this document would be useful.

the document uses the term SHOULD in a number of places.  (e.g. multiple places
in section 7 and one in section 8) – for what its worth – I am not a fan of the
use of this term unless the text also says when not doing what the SHOULD says
to do is OK – i.e. since SHOULD is a MUST with an escape clause – I think it is
useful to actually say what the escape clause is – i.e. explain why this is not
a MUST.  (also it does seem a bit funky to say (as section 7 does) “MUST
adhere” to requirements which are SHOULDs )

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From: Sean Turner <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2021 15:41:06 -0500

Hi! I have created an issue to track this review:
https://github.com/tlswg/external-psk-design-team/issues/79

Cheers,
spt

> On Nov 15, 2021, at 14:05, Scott Bradner via Datatracker <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Reviewer: Scott Bradner
> Review result: Has Nits
>