> > I therefore request that these inappropriate changes in terminology > > be backed out again. "Port number obfuscation" is a serious > > misnomer; port numbers still are transmitted in the clear under the > > methods presented in this draft; so "port number randomization" or, > > for short, "port randomization" is the proper term -- and it is > > widely adopted by the community since several years. I dunno exactly why we're still talking about this it seems a little late in the game to worry about the nitty gritty of terminology. The WG had its consensus and passed this document along. Alfred is right that "obfuscate" is not be quite right (although I don't think "serious misnomer" is even close to an appropriate characterization), but "random" is not quite right either (some of these algorithms just aren't). I think this all comes down to the viewpoint you want to take and I think Alfred is taking a different viewpoint than the document. If you are viewing this as somehow hiding the port number from all parties outside the involved end hosts then nothing in this document obfuscates the port number at all, as Alfred notes (its still in the clear). On the other hand, if you take the point of view of the document that this offers a bit of protection against those that cannot see the packets but can guess communication patterns and try to attack those then the processes discussed in the document produce unpredictable ephemeral port numbers and therefore they are in fact 'obfuscated' to such blind attackers. I would personally just leave the obfuscation language as I think it is more correct than the 'random' language and this has made it through the WG and ultimately what we call it isn't as important as people using it. This seems a minor point. We don't have unanimous agreement, but OK...we live with rough consensus. Another path might be to re-phrase everything as 'unpredictable' ports. As I sit here I sorta wish I had thought of that long ago as that strikes me as a bit more correct than 'obfuscate' and certainly more than 'random'. But, really, its a minor point. Lets just someone decide and be done. allman
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