Background for those on the CC list, who may be unaware of GenART:
GenART is the Area Review Team for the General Area of the IETF. We
advise the General Area Director (i.e. the IETF/IESG chair) by providing
more in depth reviews than he could do himself of documents that come up
for final decision in IESG telechat. I was selected as the GenART
member to review this document. Below is my review, which was written
specifically with an eye to the GenART process, but since I believe that
it will be useful to have these comments more widely distributed, others
outside the GenART group are being copied.
Document: draft-ietf-msec-newtype-keyid-04.txt
Intended Status: Proposed Standard
Shepherding AD: Russ Housely
Review Trigger: IESG Telechat 16 February 2006
Summary:
This document is in much better shape than when I reviewed v01 for IETF LC.
There are a couple of points which I think still need clarification before it is
quite ready for PS:
- In s1 the rationale talks about money costs: the IETF generally tries to avoid
this as we are defining purely technical standards. I have suggested some
alternative words below which reflect the purely technical approach.
- There are some rather vague words in the start of the security considerations
that lead one to wonder if the security considerations are incomplete. It is
entirely possible that this is merely inappropriate English but this needs editing.
There are also a couple of editorial nits which can be fixed during copy editing
if more substantial changes are not to be made.
Detailed Review:
Issues:
s1, para 3: I misunderstood what this was trying to say in v01. I can now
discern the intent but it needs some tuning. In line with normal IETF practice
we should specify a technical proposal which will achieve a business aim rather
than actually specifying the business behaviour:
The rationale behind this is
that it will be costly for subscribers to re-distribute the
decryption keys to non-subscribers. The cost for re-distributing the
keys using the unicast channel should be higher than the cost of
purchasing the keys for this scheme to have an effect.
How about:
The rationale behind this is that it should be made substantially more
inconvenient for subscribers to re-distribute the decryption keys to
non-subscribers as compared with the non-subscribers becoming subscribers in
order to acquire these keys. In order for this scheme to induce this behavior,
the impact of the effort required to re-distribute the keys using separate
unicast channels should therefore be sufficiently high that it will not be
worthwhile for potential users of the service to access the content without
subscribing.
Security Considerations:
s6, para 1: The phrase 'there are mainly two points...' sounds dangerous when it
appears in Security Considerations. Is this supposed to mean there are
(exactly) two points? If not, are there others which you don't tell us about:
we need to know so we can check they aren't significant or alternatively they
might not be about security, in which you might write 'There are two main points
which affect the security considerations.'
Editorial Nits:
s2, last para: s/to the "empty map"/for the "empty map"/
s3: The acronym GMARCH is not defined and is only used in the section title. I
take it is something about Group key Management ARCHitecture but it doesn't seem
to be in general usage.
s3, title: s/Relations/Relationship/
s6, para 1: s/designed./designed to be used./
s6: Acronyms not expanded: MAC, TESLA.
s6, para 2: s/is not compatible with/is not appropriate for use with/
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