Yoav Nir wrote this message on Sat, Aug 02, 2014 at 23:09 +0300:
> The charter calls for the group to ?develop the TCP extensions to provide 
> unauthenticated encryption and integrity protection of TCP streams? and 
> ?define an unauthenticated key exchange mechanism." This pretty much calls 
> for design by committee.
> 
> As for shortcomings of tcpcrypt, there are two varieties to these 
> shortcomings:
> 
> Security shortcomings - here I wholeheartedly agree that security mechanisms 
> are best developed by one or a few of the right people, with everybody else 
> just examining and looking for issues. That?s why in CFRG we?re not designing 
> curves be committee, but arguing the pros and cons of several proposed 
> curves. Similarly here, all proposals have their own key exchange and crypto 
> mechanisms, and the discussions of the group are not designing them, merely 
> comparing them.

So, what specificly are the security shortcomings of tcpcrypt?  You then
go off to talk about CFRG designing curves which is unrelated to the
topic at hand...

> Deployability shortcomings - this is where claims are made in the vein of 
> ?your proposal works well in the lab, but it won?t work in this or that 
> scenario in the real world.?, or ?when blocked, your proposal does not fall 
> back gracefully to unencrypted?. Unfortunately the Internet is full of boxes 
> that don?t behave the way we expect them, and you do need a committee to 
> consider all of the ways a connection might be broken because of deploying 
> the proposed mechanism. The obvious ones are NAT devices and firewalls, but 
> mandatory proxies are not far behind in the amount of trouble they cause. You 
> can see a lot of that in httpbis, and some of that in TLS?s 1.3 discussion. 
> It?s not very pretty, but it turns out to be necessary to get something 
> widely deployed.

And how do any of this apply directly to tcpcrypt?  You say there are
deployability shortcomings, but do not enumerate any of them.

Please be specific.

Thanks.

> On Aug 2, 2014, at 9:46 PM, Watson Ladd <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > Dear all,
> > 
> > We seem to have a charter.
> > We seem to have a working implementation: tcpcrypt.
> > Why don't we attempt to determine which shortcomings need to be
> > addressed and how to fix them with tcpcrypt, instead of design by
> > committee?

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney                              Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."

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