Hi, Rainer,

Thanks for your thorough review!

Some responses are inline. 

> -------------------------------------
> 3.0
> ==
>   The security service is also applicable to BSD Syslog defined in
>    RFC3164 [7].  But, it is not ensured that the protocol 
> specification
>    defined in this document is applicable to BSD Syslog.
> ==
> 
> Do we really intend to support RFC 3164-style syslog (read: 
> nothing known about the message format) over this transport? 
> If so, the consequence is that implementations of 
> -transport-tls must check for
> 3164 format and eventually be able to handle it.
> 
> I suggest removing these two sentence, as it looks we 
> encourage that case. If they stay, we should clearly state 
> that a receiver is NOT REQUIRED to implement this.
> 

Agreed. More comments from WG is welcome!

> -------------------------------------
> Section 4.3, inside the ABNF:
> 
> >    SP = " "
> 
> I think this is problematic in respect to 2.4 of RFC 4234. I 
> suggest replacing by
> 
> SP = %d32
> 

I checked the ABNF with:
http://rtg.ietf.org/~fenner/abnf.cgi

It seems the tools suggest to use " " rather than %d32. I checked RFC4234,
it says that it permits the specification of literal text strings directly,
enclosed in quotation-marks. 

I will changed it back to %d32 to keep it consitent with the syslog
protocol. 

> -------------------------------------
> 5.1
> 
> ==
>    When confidentiality is a concern, a sender/relay MUST authenticate
>    the receiver to make sure it is talking to the right peer.
> ==
> 
> I do not find the MUST is appropriate here: "when 
> confidentiality is a concern" is not a hard fact. What does 
> it mean? When MUST I implement authentication. Is my 
> Implementation not compliant to this doc if I have the wrong 
> understanding of "when confidentiality is a concern". Or MUST 
> I always implement it, because confidentiality is probably 
> very often a concern?
> 
> I think this is a operator-issue not to be dealt with in the 
> protocol. I suggest dropping this sentence or at last spell 
> MUST in lower case.
> 

Probably lower case. The point is confidentility is meaningless without
authenticaion. 

> -------------------------------------
> 5.2
> Isn't that a security consideration (and belongs to that secition)?
> 

RFC3552 request the residual risk should be descripted in the security
consideration section. The section is about residual risk of generic
certificate.

> -------------------------------------
> 6.2
> IANA registry names must be suggested (of course this comment 
> is irrelevant if we drop VERSION).
> 
> -------------------------------------
> Consistent Spelling
> Both version and VERSION is used for the respectively-named 
> field. I suggest to resort to a single spelling. This also 
> removes some ambiguities if the version field or the concept 
> of a version is meant in some parts of the text. I suggest 
> using VERSION consistently for the respective field.
> 

Agreed.

> -------------------------------------
> "Security Considerations" is missing
> I wonder I didn't spot this earlier. IMHO any document must 
> have a "Security Considerations" section. Of course, the 
> whole document talks about security, but does that obsolete 
> the section showing the weaknesses of the protocol?
> 

Section 5 is Security Consideration, but maybe I should add a S to it
(Security Considerations):-) 

> For example, I have at least three candiates to be included:
> 
> - Problems in relay scenario
> A relay may receive data via traditional syslog and forward 
> it via a tls-encrypted channel to its next destination. In 
> this case, the channel to the next hop is secured, but the 
> trust level of the message is considerably lower.
> 


> - there is no rule that a sender must use the same host name 
> inside the -protocol HOSTNAME field as it uses in the 
> certificate's common name. I think that has some security 
> implications.
> 

TLS transport does not check HOSTNAME in syslog message because transport
must not depend on content of the payload (or else a relay must check the
content of each message). 

> - cipher suites and such are left to the operator. We should 
> indicate the (serious) consequences of this selection
> 
> ---------------------------------------------
> One note on the cipher suites:
> I know there has been some discussion previously, but I 
> wasn't able to find the post in question in the archive. 
> Probably you can help me out.
> 
> Question: how do we guarantee a minimum interoperability of 
> implementations of this document if we do not specify any 
> cipher suite?
> 

Tom and I discussed this issue on the mailing list. TLS protocol has its
mandatory suite (TLS_RSA_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA), and TLS specification says
that if application profile(syslog-tls in this case) does not specify a
mandatory cipher suite, TLS mandatory suite will apply. So, no need to
specify one in this specification.




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