Subject: [Gen-art] GenART review of draft-eronen-ipsec-ikev2-clarifications-08.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 2 May 2006 21:25:03 -0400

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.

This review was done as part of IETF Last Call.

Review criteria: "Is this document a reasonable contribution to the
area of Internet engineering which it covers?  If not, what changes
would make it so?"

This draft is basically ready for publication as an Informational
RFC, but has nits that should be fixed before publication.

Overall the draft is well written, clear, and detailed, making
extensive use of examples.  It should be a valuable reference
for IKEv2 implementers.

This draft is close to the edge of what an Informational
RFC can do without updating the base IKEv2 specification.
There are a number of places where the lower case admonitions
are clearly intended to convey "SHOULD" and "MUST" (and
their negatives) to implementers (e.g., most of the
recommendations include discussion of what can go wrong,
in some cases seriously, if the recommendation is not
followed).

OTOH, keeping this document Informational may have been a
useful way of enforcing the "thou shalt not incompatibly
change IKEv2" commandment.

Section 1: Will the "work-in-progress" paragraph still be
appropriate for the published RFC?  The paragraph should be
deleted if will not be appropriate.  I would expect that
most of these interpretations will stand up over time.

Section 7.2: The ECN example is a good one, as the IKEv1 to
IKEv2 change was used to mandate ECN-friendly behavior of
tunnel mode SAs.  The specific area of RFC 2401 involved
in ECN was updated by RFC 3168, but RFC 4301 still requires
different behavior even after this update.  I think it's
the authors' choice as to whether this section should mention
RFC 3168's changes to this area of RFC 2401, as it is not
necessary to the discussion.

Thanks,
--David
----------------------------------------------------
David L. Black, Senior Technologist
EMC Corporation, 176 South St., Hopkinton, MA  01748
+1 (508) 293-7953             FAX: +1 (508) 293-7786
[email-masked]        Mobile: +1 (978) 394-7754
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From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 18:02:57 -0700

>RFC, but has nits that should be fixed before publication.

Not after? :-)

>most of these interpretations will stand up over time.

We removed that whole paragraph. We didn't want to do so before IETF 
last call in case there was a lot of work uncovered.

>necessary to the discussion.

We want to keep this document aligned with RFC 4301, for better or worse.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium