Magnus Westerlund has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-lwig-curve-representations-19: Discuss

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DISCUSS:
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So this discuss is on the process violations that has occurred for this
document.

The first which is fairly straightforward to address is in regards to that the
document would require a new IETF last call for proposed standard as it was
last called only as informational on 2020-08-25. However, there is no point of
doing this before the second part of this discuss has been addressed.

The second part of the discuss is that this document is out of charter for the
LWIG WG. The LWIG charter is clear on that the WG shall not define protocols,
only describe how one does implementation that are lightweight but standard
compliants. Thus, the document in its current form where it define a number of
new curves is thus outside of this charter and that needs to be addressed
before this work has a chance to be progressed. I think it is important that
this is taken serious as this work defines new curves even if derived from
existing ones do need proper review in relevant WG or RG where interested
parties are more likely to see and comment on this work. I think a good
illustration of this is the reaction in COSE WG when people become aware of
this work. So lets look at what I think are a couple of potential ways of
dealing with this, in falling preferences from my perspective.

1) Move the draft to an appropriate WG/RG, I think CFRG could be a reasonable
choice but I assume the SEC ADs might have better guidance on this. 2) Rewrite
the document to fit the LWIG chartered scope, i.e. not define any new curves
only document how one can realize existing standard curves using the transform
method in this document. 3) Recharter LWIG to allow this work. I think this is
a bad choice as doing security standard specification appears to be out of
scope. 4) Declare the work dead

A path here needs to be chosen. I can understand that this is frustrating for
the author and other proponents. However, there appear to exist venues within
IETF and IRTF which do works on curve specifications and their application to
various protocols. Thus, we need to use these to ensure proper review.

I don't think there is much reason to try to place any blame here. There are
multiple parties that appears to have made less than optimal decision during
the process since WG adoption. What is clear to me is that the scope of the
draft has crept from its original adoption into LWIG when it appears to have
been in scope from my brief review of the 00.





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