Christoph,

> Adding Dave Black who has helped with IANA interaction in NVMe recently.

I see my cue ... please keep me cc:'d on this conversation, as I'm not on 
either of the mailing lists.

> But we'll need IANA assignments and IETF consensus before adding new
> algorithms to ensure we have interoperable implementations.

In reverse order ...

-- IETF Consensus: 

My sense of the IETF view on secure hashes is that MD5 and SHA1 are broken, 
whereas the SHA2 algorithms are proving to be longer-lived (more resistant to 
attack) than expected, and the SHA3 algorithms are fine.

That suggests that registration of codepoints for both SHA2 and SHA3 would be a 
good thing to do, as opposed to only SHA3.  I'd suggest starting with either 
SHA-256 or SHA-512/256 (both are SHA2 hashes) in addition to SHA3-256, as all 
three have the same 256-bit output size.

Figuring out exactly what should be done here (e.g., which SHA2 variant to 
register) would benefit from some discussion at IETF.  I would start with the 
Security Area's s...@ietf.org mailing list.  In addition, as iSCSI falls within 
IETF's Transport Area, the Transport Area Directors ought to be looped in 
beforehand.  Fortunately, publication of an RFC is not necessary, because ...

-- IANA assignments

... the Registration Procedure for PPP Authentication Algorithms is Expert 
Review.   The long version of what that means is in Section 4.5 of RFC 8126: 
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8126#section-4.5.  The short version is that a 
request for allocation of these codepoints is submitted to IANA, whose 
designated expert then makes a decision.  It's probably a good idea for that 
request to state that the intended usage is iSCSI, and say that it's ok to 
restrict the resulting registrations solely to use by iSCSI.

As Christoph notes, I've helped with IANA interactions at NVMe, and would be 
likewise willing to help here.  My name is attached to the SHA1 registration, 
so it would make sense for me to ask for the SHA2 and SHA3 registrations, and I 
know a number of the people who will be involved in ensuring that the 
proverbial "right thing" happens, e.g., the Transport Area Directors.

Thanks, --David

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Christoph Hellwig <h...@infradead.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, September 3, 2019 3:00 AM
> To: Maurizio Lombardi
> Cc: cle...@redhat.com; mchri...@redhat.com; linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org;
> target-de...@vger.kernel.org; Black, David
> Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] iscsi: chap: introduce support for SHA1 and
> SHA3-256
> 
> 
> [EXTERNAL EMAIL]
> 
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2019 at 05:59:25PM +0200, Maurizio Lombardi wrote:
> > iSCSI with the Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol is not FIPS
> compliant.
> > This is due to the fact that CHAP currently uses MD5 as the only supported
> > digest algorithm and MD5 is not allowed by FIPS.
> >
> > When FIPS mode is enabled on the target server, the CHAP authentication
> > won't work because the target driver will be prevented from using the
> MD5 module.
> >
> > Given that CHAP is agnostic regarding the algorithm it uses, this
> > patchset introduce support for two new alternatives: SHA1 and SHA3-256.
> >
> > SHA1 has already its own assigned value for its use in CHAP, as reported by 
> > IANA:
> > https://www.iana.org/assignments/ppp-numbers/ppp-numbers.xml#ppp-numbers-9
> > On the other hand the use of SHA1 on FIPS-enabled systems has been 
> > deprecated
> > and therefore it's not a vialable long term option.
> >
> > We could consider introducing a more modern hash algorithm like SHA3-256, as
> > this patchset does.
> 
> But we'll need IANA assignments and IETF consensus before adding new
> algorithms to ensure we have interoperable implementations.
> 
> Adding Dave Black who has helped with IANA interaction in NVMe recently.

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