Authors, WG,
Following is a comment on Section 4.30.2.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-netmod-rfc8407bis-06#section-4.30.2
The text says:
====START====
An IANA-maintained module may use identities (e.g., [RFC8675]) or enumerations
(e.g., [RFC9108]). The decision about which type to use is left to the module
designers and should be made based upon specifics related to the intended use
of the IANA-maintained module. For example, identities are useful if the
registry entries are organized hierarchically, possibly including multiple
inheritances. It is RECOMMENDED that the reasoning for the design choice is
documented in the companion specification that registers an IANA-maintained
module. For example, [RFC9244] defines an IANA-maintained module that uses
enumerations for the following reason:
"The DOTS telemetry module (Section 10.1) uses "enumerations" rather
than "identities" to define units, samples, and intervals because
otherwise the namespace identifier "ietf-dots-telemetry" must be
included when a telemetry attribute is included (e.g., in a
mitigation efficacy update). The use of "identities" is thus
suboptimal from a message compactness standpoint; one of the key
requirements for DOTS messages."
====STOP====
I’m wondering if the guidance here cannot be stronger but, first, let me
explain how I got here…
The "ssh-client-server" and the "tls-client-server” drafts both register
IANA-maintained modules for IANA-registries (for crypto algorithms). All of
these IANA-modules use *identities* (not enums).
As I’m in the process of updating the two drafts to follow this template, I’m
struggling with the above quoted text. The reason for the struggle is because
I’m having a hard time justifying these draft’s current use of identities
(yikes!)
The impetus for using identities in the first place was to enable new
identities to be added by future modules (and nothing to do with multiple
inheritances). But when moving to the modules being IANA-maintained, it seems
that we’re simultaneously saying that new values should NOT be definable any
other way. That is, IETF would NOT publish new algorithms via new RFCs, when
IANA is already publishing said algorithms via revisions of the base-module).
Perhaps it is theoretically possible that "proprietary” algorithms could be
used in private deployments, but such would not foster the interoperability
that IETF seeks.
Thus I am wondering if the guidance in this section should be stronger. Should
it actually say something like “Enumerations SHOULD be used unless the
multiple-inheritance property of identities is needed.”?
Thoughts?
Kent // contributor
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