Spencer Dawkins has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-dane-ops-14: No Objection

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COMMENT:
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Thanks for producing this document. I wish the IETF could produce more
like it.

I had a bunch of editorial comments and questions. I see how nuanced the
recommendations are, so I might just lack the background to understand
some of the material, but I wanted to pass them along.

I was sort of surprised that the first two paragraphs of the introduction
were about TLS and DTLS, and DANE wasn't mentioned until the third
paragraph. Maybe move the third paragraph to the top of the section?

In section 1.1, in this text:

   TLSA parameters:  In [RFC6698] the TLSA record is defined to consist
      of four fields.  The first three of these are numeric parameters
      that specify the meaning of the data in the fourth and final
      field.  This document refers to the first three fields as "TLSA
      parameters", or sometimes just "parameters" when obvious from
      context.

I was pretty lost until I got to section 2, where at least the first
three fields were named - the fourth wasn't named until the last line of
Section 2.1. Any chance all four fields could be named here? 

In section 4, in this text:

   Protocol designers need to carefully consider which set of DANE
   certificate usages to support.  Simultaneous support for all four
   usages is NOT RECOMMENDED for DANE clients.  Protocol designers are
   encouraged to specify use of either the PKIX-TA(0) and PKIX-EE(1)
                                ^^^^^^                ^^^
   certificate usages, or the use of the DANE-TA(2) and DANE-EE(3)
                       ^^                           ^^^
   usages.  When all four usages are supported, an attacker capable of
   compromising the integrity of DNSSEC needs only to replace server's
   TLSA RRset with one that lists suitable DANE-EE(3) or DANE-TA(2)
   records, effectively bypassing an added verification via public CAs.
   In other words, when all four usages are supported, PKIX-TA(2) and
   PKIX-EE(1) offer only illusory incremental security over DANE-TA(2)
   and DANE-EE(3).
   
I'm sure the third sentence is accurate, but it took me a while to parse
the logical operators and figure out that the point was XOR ((A and B),
(C and D)) (I think). I think the paragraph would actually be clearer
with that sentence completely removed.

About six paragraphs down into section 5.1, I see

   TLSA records published for DANE servers should, as a best practice,
   be "DANE-EE(3) SPKI(1) SHA2-256(1)" records.
   
Is this an unqualified "do this in all cases"? If so, it's buried really
deeply. If not, it wasn't obvious to me what the qualifications might
be.

Just as a nit, in section 5.2.2, I see

   With DANE-TA(2), a complication arises when the TA certificate is
   omitted from the server's certificate chain, perhaps on the basis of
   Section 7.4.2 of [RFC5246]:

   The sender's certificate MUST come first in the list.  Each
   following certificate MUST directly certify the one preceding
   it.  Because certificate validation requires that root keys be
   distributed independently, the self-signed certificate that
   specifies the root certification authority MAY be omitted from
   the chain, under the assumption that the remote end must
   already possess it in order to validate it in any case.
   
Is that where the quote stops? I didn't check, but indenting the quote
would help.

Thanks for including section 10.1.1, UDP and TCP Considerations.

In section 10.1.2,

   While TLSA records using a TLSA Selector of SPKI(1) and a TLSA
   Matching Type of Full(0) (which publish the bare public keys without
   the overhead of a containing X.509 certificate) are generally more
   compact, these are also best avoided as when significantly larger
                                        ^^^^^^^
   than their digests.
   
The ^^^^ text wasn't parsing for me. "because they are/can be
significantly larger"? But I'm guessing.

In section 10.3,

   If, on the other hand, the use of TLS is "opportunistic", then the
   client SHOULD generally use the server via an unauthenticated TLS
   connection, but if TLS encryption cannot be established, the client
   MUST NOT use the server.  Standards for DANE specific to the
   particular application protocol may modify the above requirements, as
   appropriate.
   
I found myself wondering how you'd know modifying those requirements is
appropriate. Is there any guidance you could give, or an example?

In section 11,

   When the registrar is also the DNS operator for the domain, one needs
   to consider whether the registrar will allow orderly migration of the
   domain to another registrar or DNS operator in a way that will
   maintain DNSSEC integrity.  TLSA Publishers SHOULD ensure their
   registrar publishes a suitable domain transfer policy.
   
I'm thinking that's not an RFC 2119 SHOULD, but if it is, I wonder why
it's not a MUST ...

I have the same thoughts about this text in section 11,
   
   DNS Operators SHOULD use a registrar lock of their domains
   to offer some protection against this possibility.

and this text, in the following paragraph.

   TLSA Publishers SHOULD ensure their
   registrar publishes a suitable domain transfer policy.


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