On Apr 11, 2014, at 2:40 PM, Stephen Farrell <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> Hiya,
> 
> Trevor was asking me about the state of play here. The
> answer might be more generally useful so forwarding this
> (with permission) in case it is.
> 
> Cheers,
> S.

Dear Stephen,

There is in fact a reasonable email solution with low leakage unlike PGP or 
S/MIME.

See: 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dane-smtp-with-dane-07

Regards,
Douglas Otis


> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: Delivering perpass
> Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 13:14:50 +0100
> From: Stephen Farrell <[email protected]>
> To: Trevor Freeman <[email protected]>,  Kathleen Moriarty
> <[email protected]>
> 
> 
> Hi Trevor,
> 
> On 04/10/2014 10:35 PM, Trevor Freeman wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>> 
>> I am curious how you see the perpass discussion changing some of IETF
>> practices.
>> 
>> As noted in the perpass attack draft
>> 
>> Pervasive monitoring is a technical attack that should be mitigated
>> in the design of IETF protocols, where possible
>> 
>> How is the "where possible" going to be assessed. Will the
>> presumption become you must defend against perpass unless you can
>> show solid reasons why not? For example, requiring authors to
>> document some possible approaches and why they were eliminated to at
>> least show they tried? What about the backwards compatibility card,
>> how often can that be played?
> 
> The reality is that we'll have to learn as we go. Our new bcp
> does not say you "must defend against" but rather that you must
> have considered the topic. The extent to which that gets done
> well or badly is something we'll have to see, as will the ways
> that participants, WGs and the IESG deal with that. Please
> don't though consider this as something the IESG police, it'll
> be better off all around if participants do consider the PM
> attack and if WGs take that into account, as per the new BCP.
> Same as always, factoring stuff like this in early is going
> to be better and easier all around.
> 
> Backwards compatibility is clearly an issue but I don't think
> of it as a card to play, its another engineering constraint
> that we have to deal with. For example, we are not getting rid
> of email, and won't even though email is leaky as hell with
> meta-data even with S/MIME or PGP. If someone did come up with
> a workable e2e email security solution that was way less leaky
> and that got deployed, then we would want to consider that, but
> since that's mythical, it doesn't arise. So absent a working
> solution, for email, backwards compatibility is likely to be
> a factor forever. In other cases, YMMV of course but that's
> just because we're dealing with partly conflicting constraints,
> as we always do.
> 
>> 
>> Do we need to go though and audit the existing portfolio to see where
>> we have work to do to meet the higher standards i.e. perpass
>> resistant?
> 
> There's work started to do reviews of old RFCs for this.
> We'd be delighted if you were to join in on that! Contact
> Avri Doria or Scott Brim. There's a wiki page at [1] for
> that.
> 
>  [1] https://trac.tools.ietf.org/group/ppm-legacy-review/
> 
> The intent there is that as and when we do new work on
> those technologies, these reviews can inform that work.
> And maybe these reviews might motivate folks to do new
> work as well, we'll see. We're in a try-and-see mode
> right now, and hope to see how that's going at IETF-90,
> so your input on that now would be really timely and
> appreciated if you have a few cycles to pick an RFC,
> make a ticket and do a review of that in the next month
> or so. (Go on, I bet you have some RFC you can think of
> that could be useful low-hanging fruit for this:-)
> 
>> 
>> Do we need a new guidance rfc to lay out the priorities for
>> confidentially, integrity and authentication security for rfc
>> authors?
> 
> Yes we do. But we're not ready for that yet. The idea I
> think would be to add a new RFC to BCP 72 [2] that sets
> out what we've learned, once we've learned enough. I'd
> hope that we might be able to start on that towards the
> end of the year. (And again, feel free to volunteer in
> advance to help out:-)
> 
>  [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp72
> 
> We also want to get the threat model draft [3] done so
> consider helping out there too if you've time with
> comments/text etc as usual.
> 
>  [3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-barnes-pervasive-problem
> 
>> 
>> The standards we write can be used both on-premise and in the cloud.
>> Pervasive monitoring is a bigger priority for cloud deployments. How
>> should we reconcile those two scenarios since they are deployment
>> specific.
> 
> Yes, that tension is noted in pepass-attack and will be
> part of the working-out that we work out. There's also
> however the fact that while many deployments previously
> considered protocols to be running in "trusted" environments,
> we have seen (e.g. Belgacom) that that is not such a
> good assumption any more given the PM attack. That has
> already had clear impact for e.g. inter data centre
> traffic deployments, but will take longer to work out
> for e.g. Diameter deployments I expect. But in both cases
> the change is not so much to the protocol but to turn
> on security.
> 
>> I am sure you and your colleges on the IESG have been mulling over
>> similar questions.
> 
> Yep. We're discussing some modification to the discuss
> criteria [4] in the short term, and will have a broader
> discussion at the IESG retreat in May. Jari posted about
> the discuss criteria change plan to the IETF list before,
> but we're wrangling text at the moment. Anything longer
> term, will be reported as usual and the community will
> get their say as usual.
> 
>  [4] https://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/discuss-criteria.html
> 
>> I was just curious what might be written on the new stones when you
>> come back down the mountain. Thanks Trevor
> 
> There's no mountain and no stones:-) The perpass-attack LC
> for example had nearly 1000 messages on various lists and
> the Vancouver tech plenary had I'd say about 1000 people
> in the room. The IESG are not aiming to surprise anyone on
> this, but to reflect the IETF consensus, which is rough,
> but which I hope will get less rough as we go and as folks
> see that we're improving things without going crazy.
> 
> Cheers,
> S.
> 
> PS: Now that I've written this, it might be a useful
> state-of-play to send to the perpass list, mind if I
> do that by just forwarding this?
> 
> 
> 
>> 
> 
> 
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> [email protected]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/perpass

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