Re: [Last-Call] Last Call: <draft-gont-numeric-ids-sec-considerations-06.txt> (Security Considerations for Transient Numeric Identifiers Employed in Network Protocols) to Best Current Practice

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On 31/12/20 14:42, Paul Wouters wrote:
[....]
3) What the "controversy" is all about?

That I'm a little confused about too. I don't follow Theo de Raadt's
reasoning of the end of the world.

I believe he has been quite explicit.

The OpenBSD crew had to figure out (and fix!) flawed numeric IDs for many different protocols, on their own, because the protocol specifications that we (IETF) shipped were flawed in that respect. Doing so not only has taken them a lot of time and effort, but has also been non-trivial. This eventually had to be done independently by developers of different operating systems, and in same cases, choices made to fix the flaws led to interoperability issues.

So it's not hard to follow Theo when, given a very long history of flawed numeric IDs in our specs, when there's finally some effort to improve that, there's push-back from some folks on the basis of:

* Objecting things that are not part of our document (!)

* Arguing that since there's a spec coming that fails to follow our
  advice, the right thing to do is to shoot down the advice, rather than
  fixing the spec that has problems.

In your email, you claimed "It is [..] a really low bar that we should be already meeting at the IETF in general at this point." Clearly, that bar has not been met, and is not being met. So this document tries to be as explicit as possible recommending protocol specs authors to meet that bar, and how to do it, such that we stop repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

Thanks,
--
Fernando Gont
SI6 Networks
e-mail: fgont@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
PGP Fingerprint: 6666 31C6 D484 63B2 8FB1 E3C4 AE25 0D55 1D4E 7492




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