Stephen Farrell has entered the following ballot position for draft-ietf-precis-saslprepbis-17: Discuss
When responding, please keep the subject line intact and reply to all email addresses included in the To and CC lines. (Feel free to cut this introductory paragraph, however.) Please refer to https://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/discuss-criteria.html for more information about IESG DISCUSS and COMMENT positions. The document, along with other ballot positions, can be found here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-precis-saslprepbis/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DISCUSS: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.1: zero length password - I think you're wrong on that one but it is arguable. If RFC4013 also prohibited zero length passwords (I couldn't tell at a quick glance) or if the WG did debate this and having done so decided to prohibit zero length passwords then I will clear the discuss immediately. But if not, I'd like to chat about it... There are situations where an empty password is ok (say when I'm not "protecting" something but just want to know what user's profile to use, e.g. for weather) and that is supported in many systems (that hence won't be able to exactly adopt this) and insisting on a non-empty password could be more damaging than allowing a zero-length password, whenever a user re-uses a password for something for which no password is really needed (and which hence is less likely to be well protected) and where that password is also used to protect something of significantly higher value. The zero-length password is also not an interesting subset of the set of stupid passwords really so doesn't deserve to be called out as such (and you say that in the draft when you talk about length-1 passwords.) So I think allowing zero length passwords is better overall, and more consistent with implementations. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMENT: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Unsurprisingly, the diff between this and RFC4013 isn't useful, so I read from scratch. If I'm commenting on something that was already true of 4013, just tell me and that'll be fine. - intro: given the unsolved i18n issues and the fact that passwords are crap (security wise) would it be fair to ask that you add a sentence here to encourage folks to not use passwords at all but some better form of authentication, when that's possible? (Which is sadly not nearly common enough for user authentication.) - nitty nit: intro, 2nd last para on p3: once a password is chosen, there are no more entropy changes so you cannot maximise entropy *during* authentication. Maybe s/during/for/ works though. - 3.2.2, bullet 3: I read this as saying to use the latest Unicode default case folding and not to stick with v7.0 even if a new and in this sense different version is published. This is just to check that that is what you intended and that I've not misread the text. _______________________________________________ precis mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/precis
