Re: [HOKEY] Last Call: draft-ietf-hokey-erx (EAP Extensions for EAP Re-authentication Protocol (ERP)) to Proposed Standard

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Hi Joe,

Sorry for the delayed response.  I was without a functional laptop for 
the better part of the last 30 or so hours and so I am behind on a few 
things here.

Please see inline:

On 2/6/2008 10:00 PM, Joseph Salowey (jsalowey) wrote:
> Thanks for your quick response, comments inline: 
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Lakshminath Dondeti [mailto:ldondeti@xxxxxxxxxxxx] 
>> Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2008 1:03 AM
>> To: Joseph Salowey (jsalowey)
>> Cc: hokey@xxxxxxxx; ietf@xxxxxxxx
>> Subject: Re: [HOKEY] Last Call: draft-ietf-hokey-erx (EAP 
>> Extensions for EAP Re-authentication Protocol (ERP)) to 
>> Proposed Standard
>>
>> Thanks for the review Joe.
>>
>> On 2/5/2008 11:26 PM, Joseph Salowey (jsalowey) wrote:
>>> In reading this draft (-09 version) I came up with a few 
>> questions and
>>> comments:
>>>
>>> Section 3 -
>>>
>>> Section 3 is a bit confusing it seems that much of the text 
>> is section
>>> 3.1 (detailed description of exchanges) should go into section 3.0 
>>> because it seems that much of the process should be the 
>> same for local 
>>> or remote cases.  Currently it is difficult to really tell what 
>>> pertains to local, remote and both.
>>>
>>> It does not appear to be clear how the peer knows if it is 
>> in the "home"
>>> case or the "local" case, whether the network is capable of 
>> ERX (and 
>>> vice versa) or how the peer knows what key to use.  Perhaps 
>> I missed 
>>> this elsewhere in the document.
>> We worked to clarify this in the last revision.  I will make 
>> another pass at it while preparing v10 and run it by you 
>> (probably sometime tomorrow).
>>
>>> Section 4 -
>>>
>>> Section 4.1.1 duplicates text in
>>> internet-drafts/draft-ietf-hokey-emsk-hierarchy-03.txt.   It really
>>> should not.  It should reference KDF functions instead of PRFs.  I 
>>> believe if you replace prf+ with KDF it would be fine.  Do 
>> you want to 
>>> use the naming defined in 
>>> internet-drafts/draft-ietf-hokey-emsk-hierarchy-03.txt or are you 
>>> specifying your own?  Are these key names really necessary? 
>>  They do 
>>> no appear to be used anywhere?
>> This is true.  I think we were trying overly hard to name 
>> everything (one of 4962 things?) and I realized earlier that 
>> we have a procedure to even name the rMSKs.  But, it is not 
>> clear whether the rMSK names will be used anywhere.
>>
>> I just sent that email about naming and so we should be able 
>> to clean this stuff up now if that is acceptable to everyone.
>>
> [Joe] If this is what we discussed I believe it will help, I will take a
> look at that. 

Yes, and I am going to poll some folks to make sure that is ok with them 
too.  Please review; if you want I can provide details (might ask Dan 
for some help) for your review.

> 
>> On duplication, it seems we have two strong opinions here.  
>> You are suggesting less duplication and Alan is suggesting 
>> more :).  I guess we may have actually achieved the (un)happy medium!
>>
>> My opinion is that we should have less duplication, perhaps 
>> to the extent you are suggesting, so the idea is to not have 
>> to update (when we
>> need) text in two different drafts.  That said, there are 
>> some usage specific properties to consider, specifically we 
>> are trying to specify crypto-agility in case of ERP and for 
>> those reasons, the derivations may need to be spelled out again.
>>
> [Joe] I think if we need to spell out the derivations in this document
> there is a problem.  This would indicate there is something wrong with
> the EMSK document that needs to be fixed. 

Yeah, I tend to agree.  I am talking to Alan soon and after that propose 
a direction here.

> 
>> In the next revision, I'll see what I can do to reduce the 
>> duplication (but before that I will talk to Alan to see what 
>> he wants).
>>
>>> Why such a long key label?
>> Which one?
>> "EAP Re-authentication Root Key@xxxxxxxx"?  I guess we could 
>> call it "EAP rRK" but that might be an abbreviation for 
>> something else in the future.  Please suggest another name 
>> :), but hopefully one that does not involve changing the 
>> entire document (I don't want to introduce errors with too 
>> many global changes).
>>
> [Joe] I suppose it doesn't matter much, it just seems that name is
> unnecessarily long.  The point of registering the labels with IANA is to
> avoid conflicts. 
> 
>>> Section 5 -
>>>
>>> Section 5.1
>>>
>>> What state are you referencing here? I don't think the 
>>> CalledStation-ID is what you want to reference, I believe RADIUS 
>>> routing is typically done with the username when EAP is 
>> used.  Why is 
>>> it only RECOMMENDED to maintain this state?  It seems 
>> either it is a MUST or it doesn't matter.
>>> In general authenticators do not do routing, AAA does routing.
>>> Authenticators copy the correct attributes from EAP into 
>> the correct 
>>> attributes in the AAA message.  This seems much more complicated
>>> (routing, multiple attributes TLVs etc).   Its not clear if the 3
>>> sub-bullets of the first bullet refer to what the 
>> authenticator needs to
>>> do or the peer needs to do.   It seems that the 
>> authenticator should be
>>> able to extract a single field from the peer message to 
>> determine what 
>>> to do with it.  Either it will handle it locally or it will 
>> pass the 
>>> message within the AAA protocol copying the appropriate 
>> field into the 
>>> message.
>> I see.  I will make it clear and separate as to what the peer 
>> must and what the authenticator must do.  I think we have 
>> done that in the sections after that, but I can see the ambiguity.
>>
>> On the AAA stuff and the reference to state, could you please 
>> suggest text?  Thanks.  We should say the AAA client in the 
>> ER authenticator to be more precise.  I was going to talk to 
>> Alan about the AAA stuff later this week, but in the 
>> meanwhile, please suggest text in this case and that'll help 
>> clean up that text.  Thanks.
>>
> [Joe] I think the draft prescribes a bit too much about the back end AAA
> operation.  AAA routing etc should work pretty much as it does to day if
> this is going to be at all deployable.  I'll try to put some more
> specific text together. 

Thanks.  In fact, with the simplification you proposed -- use 
keyname/rIKname-NAI as the only attribute -- we can probably get rid of 
the references to the stored state etc.

> 
>>> Is the integrity checksum a keyed hash or MAC (if so why 
>> use another 
>>> term?)?
>> Integrity checksum is the most generic term (I would think 
>> that keyed hash would not be sufficiently generic; I guess 
>> MAC might work, but people have had problems with that word, 
>> especially folks with L2 background).  I do see that there 
>> are references to authentication tags and integrity 
>> checksums.  There is no need for multiple terms (or at least 
>> we should say they mean the same thing).
>>
>>> If so what key is used?  If a key is used in the context in 
>> the packet 
>>> enough to determine the key?  Is it possible that more that 
>> one EMSK 
>>> has been generated by the same peer?
>> The key is rIK and there is an rIKname to refer to it.  With 
>> the new proposal, the rIKname or keyname, it should be called 
>> now, will be the emskname and in the context of ERP we use 
>> either the DS-rIK or an rIK in the integrity checksum 
>> calculation; whether it is the rIK or the DS-rIK is 
>> determined by the NAI used.  If that is ambiguous, we need to 
>> work on fixing the ambiguity :).  Please let me know.
>>
> [Joe] I found it confusing in this section, it was not clear that if the
> domain is not communicated in the lower layer how the peer decided to
> use which key to use.  I think it is that if they are using their home
> NAI then they use the rIK.  I'm not sure this is spelled out in the
> document. 

Ok, will check and clarify as necessary in the next revision.

> 
>>> Why must the authenticator rely upon the information cached 
>> from the EAP
>>> exchange, isn't there enough information in ERX messages?   
>> Good question.  I will try and dig up information on why this 
>> is necessary.
>>
>>> The whole
>>> routing section is complex and is not something that authenticators 
>>> generally do now.  Why do you need an alternate to 
>> R1KName-NAI?  Why 
>>> is the peer name necessary?  Why isn't a R1KName an NAI? Should the 
>>> R1Kname sent by the server match the one sent by the client?
>> There are some options here.  In fact, we used to have the 
>> option of server-ID and we got rid of that to remove some of 
>> the complexity (that was introduced at some point because 
>> someone suggested it, but later no one in the WG cared for it).
>>
>> So, now there are three combinations really.
>> The first is rIKname, Peer ID and
>> the second is rIKname-NAI
>> we also support rIKname alone, but that works only if 
>> authenticator have a default ER server to send all ER messages to.
>>
> [Joe] Isn't the r1Kname alone a valid NAI?

We differentiate between rIKname and rIKname-NAI, but if I understand 
your point, you are suggesting using rIKname-NAI and that's that.  That 
kind of simplification is being suggested by a few folks and so that is 
what we'll do.

> 
>> Perhaps there is scope for simplification here.  Please see below ...
>>
>>> Section 5.1.1
>>>
>>> It seems there is another option other than obtaining a 
>> DSRK from the 
>>> home domain, you may retrieve the rRK derived from the DSRK.  There 
>>> are also key distribuiton attributes for RADIUS defined in 
>>>
>> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-zorn-radius-keywrap-13.txt 
>>> and 
>> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-zorn-radius-keyreq-08.txt.
>>> Is there a reason why we need to diverge? 
>> No reason to diverge.  In fact, we do intend to use keywrap.  
>> Charles has some ideas about how to bring that all together.  
>> I am waiting to hear from him.  I have spoken to Glen before 
>> and he gave some pointers too.  I am going to talk to Alan as 
>> well and get his thoughts from his DTLS draft perspective.  
>> The idea is to specify attributes for requesting the DSRK and 
>> an attribute to send the DSRK, the keyname and lifetime.  
>> Either keywrap or dtls can be used protect such request and response.
>>
> [Joe] Neither of these are referenced in the draft instead the draft
> references another set of documents.  It would be good to use a
> consistent set of attributes to carry keys.  

It is a chain of references.  I have spoken to Glen about this a few 
times and the intent is definitely to reuse the work already in progress :).

I will writeup a brief note on the attributes and propose changes to the 
WG and ask if there are objections for the simplification.

regards,
Lakshminath

> 
>>> Section 5.2
>>>
>>> Ditto of most of the concerns in 5.1/5.1.1. Do we need two sections?
>> 5.1 is bootstrapping and 5.2 is the protocol run.  Two 
>> sections are better to clarify the distinction.  I will look 
>> for any obvious duplication and try to get rid of it.  But 
>> here again we get into duplication vs. too little detail 
>> (perhaps we can get rid of the duplication here since it's 
>> all in one document).
>>
>>> Section 5.3
>>>
>>> It would be helpful if the identity field  (R1Kname-NAI) was in a 
>>> deterministic place within the packet so the authenticator has less 
>>> work to do to extract it.  I don't see why peer name is useful (or 
>>> R1Kname-TLV).
>>>
>>>
>> Yeah, as I noted earlier, there may be scope for further 
>> simplification here.  To the extent I care, I am happier with 
>> fewer options (I guess I have said it many times already that 
>> I want this simple, and efficient).
>>
>> If we adopt the root key name scheme we discussed a little 
>> while ago, perhaps the peer-ID is not necessary.  Either the 
>> ER server pointed to by the NAI in the keyname-NAI (instead 
>> of rIKname-NAI) can identify the keyname or not.  If it does 
>> not have keys corresponding to the key referred to by 
>> "keyname" all bets are off anyway.
>>
>> I will think some more to make sure.  In the meanwhile, other 
>> folks can try and see if we are simplifying too much (i.e., 
>> losing functionality).
>>
>> We were thinking of privacy considerations at some point and 
>> noted that the server could send encrypted rIKnames in the 
>> EAP-Finish/Re-auth messages.  If there is loss of 
>> synchronization, then the peer ID can be used to resync.  
>> That is one case where the peer ID would be useful.  A few 
>> meetings ago, the WG didn't care about privacy 
>> considerations.  I guess we can drop the peer ID now.  Like I 
>> said, I will think some more, and see if there are any other 
>> corner cases.
>>
>> Thanks again Joe.
>>
>> regards,
>> Lakshminath
>>
>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: The IESG [mailto:iesg-secretary@xxxxxxxx]
>>> Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 8:13 AM
>>> To: IETF-Announce
>>> Cc: hokey@xxxxxxxx
>>> Subject: Last Call: draft-ietf-hokey-erx (EAP Extensions for EAP 
>>> Re-authentication Protocol (ERP)) to Proposed Standard
>>>
>>> The IESG has received a request from the Handover Keying WG 
>> (hokey) to 
>>> consider the following document:
>>>
>>> - 'EAP Extensions for EAP Re-authentication Protocol (ERP) '
>>>    <draft-ietf-hokey-erx-08.txt> as a Proposed Standard
>>>
>>> The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, 
>> and solicits 
>>> final comments on this action.  Please send substantive comments to 
>>> the ietf@xxxxxxxx mailing lists by 2008-02-07. 
>> Exceptionally, comments 
>>> may be sent to iesg@xxxxxxxx instead. In either case, please retain 
>>> the beginning of the Subject line to allow automated sorting.
>>>
>>> The file can be obtained via
>>> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-hokey-erx-08.txt
>>>
>>>
>>> IESG discussion can be tracked via
>>>
>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/pidtracker.cgi?command=view_id&dTa
>>> g=
>>> 15997&rfc_flag=0
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> IETF-Announce@xxxxxxxx
>>> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
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>>>
> 
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