Re: Last Call: <draft-farrell-perpass-attack-02.txt> (Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack) to Best Current Practice

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On 1/1/2014 4:08 AM, Eliot Lear wrote:
As to whether this draft is political, it cannot be stressed enough that
if one group of people can subvert our architecture, others can as well.
Our political statement, such as it is, is that in order to maintain
confidence in the Internet, our protocol suite should be resistant to
this sort of thing, but within the bounds of pragmatism.


Let me suggest that this is exactly the wrong way to talk about the issue, in the IETF. Again, it's not that the statement is wrong, but that it is not the way engineers need to approach work.

Here's engineering phrasing that gets us doing the same work, but without worrying about the human factor of "confidence". That is, it uses phrasing that matches all the other work we do, rather than placing us into some sort of social protection task:

There is a substantial community in the Internet wishing to have its data and activities protected against pervasive monitoring. The IETF needs to design specifications and practices (existing and new) with the means to ensure such protection.

Another reason of why we should stay out of the more exciting language about pervasive monitoring is that it leads us into making technical statements that are wrong. Pervasive monitoring has not 'subverted' any architecture. It has simply taken advantage of holes in the architecture.

There is a strong market request that we close those holes.

d/

--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net




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