Subject: [Gen-art] Gen-ART review of draft-ietf-idr-rfc2796bis-01

From: Lakshminath Dondeti <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2005 16:52:36 -0700

Gen-ART review of draft-ietf-idr-rfc2796bis-01 (moving towards Draft 
Standard status)
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Background for those 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 included.

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Summary: Ready with suggestion to update the security considerations 
section, and provide some clarifications(*):

1. 2796 contains a format for encoding CLUSTER_LISTs which is not present 
in 2796bis.  Perhaps there should be an explanation as to why that is not 
necessary.
2. ROUTER_ID is now referred to as BGP Identifier.  Both terms have been 
around for a long while now.  Perhaps the authors should explain what they 
have in mind in changing that term.
3. The security considerations section points to Ref[5], which if still 
correct refers to an RFC published in 1998 to use MD5 and that RFC (2385) says
"This document defines a weak but currently practiced security
    mechanism for BGP.  It is anticipated that future work will provide
    different stronger mechanisms for dealing with these issues."
At the risk of annoying the authors, I wonder if nothing has changed in the 
past 7 years to prompt an update to the Security Considerations section.
4. Editorial Nit:   Replace  "With the existing BGP model," in Page 3 with 
something like "In BGP-4"

thanks and regards,
Lakshminath

(*) I used the rfcdiff tool to compare 2796 with 2796bis.  That tools is 
quite useful! 

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