Subject: [Gen-art] Gen-ART Last Call Review of draft-mraihi-inch-thraud-05

From: Ben Campbell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:49:24 -0500

I have been selected as the General Area Review Team (Gen-ART)
reviewer for this draft (for background on Gen-ART, please see
http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/gen/art/gen-art-FAQ.html).

Please resolve these comments along with any other Last Call comments
you may receive.

Document: draft-mraihi-inch-thraud-05
Reviewer: Ben Campbell
Review Date:  2008-03-18
IETF LC End Date: 2008-03-20
IESG Telechat date: (if known)

Summary: This document is almost ready for publication as an  
informational RFC, but there are issues which should be considered  
first.

Comments:

--General:

I'd like to see some text clarifying the relationship of this draft to  
the Open Authentication initiative. The draft states that the work has  
been endorsed by that group. Is this draft merely intended to document  
work done by that group? (I note that the XML name space is scoped to http://www.openauthentication.org/ 
. ) Or is intended to specify an interoperable extension to the IODEF  
format? If the latter, how much consideration has been given to  
whether this should properly be an informational vs a standards-track  
RFC?

--Detailed Comments:

Abstract:

Please expand IODEF on first use.

Section 1, paragraph 4:

Please expand IODEF and XML on first use.

Paragraph 5:

"Verification procedures and the specific requirements for  
authorization are outside the scope of this specification."

Are these requirements specified elsewhere? They seem pretty  
fundamental for this mechanism to be useful.

Section 4, paragraph 3:

"The primary difference in the "inbound" and "outbound" reports is the  
removal in the "outbound" reports of reporting organization  
information in order to protect confidentiality. We elaborate on this  
aspect in section 7, Security Considerations."

It's a little unclear to me at this point what the outbound report  
contains and what it is used for. Maybe a discussion of what network  
element comsumes "inbound" reports and what generates "outbound  
reports" would help.

Section 4, 2nd paragraph on Page 7

(nit) There is an unfortunate line break in EventData.AdditionalData  
that has the effect of rendering the paragraph incoherent. It looks  
like AdditionalData starts a new sentence.

Section 5.4.1:

Has there been thought whether OtherEventType needs to be registered  
somewhere?

Section 6.2:

The section is titled "Optional Contents" but goes on to say these  
contents SHOULD be included. That's really stronger than "optional".  
Perhaps the section should be retitled something to the effect of  
"Recommended Contents".

paragraph 6:

"The IPv4 or IPv6 address or subnet mask..."

Address of what?

Section 6.3, first paragraph:

I'm having trouble parsing the last paragraph. I suspect a missing  
comma, along with the inconsistent verb tense ("performing", "views",  
"has changed") contribute to the problem.

Method.URL:

"A URL that represents the detailed definition of the fraud event  
signature."

Does represent mean that the URL points to the definition, or somehow  
encodes it? Is there a definition of the format of the data this will  
point to? What URL schemes can go here?

Section 8:

I think the security consideration section should talk a little more  
on what attacks are known possible, and how the required security  
features address them. That is, _why_ we need signatures, etc. Don't  
just assume it to be obvious.

Section 8.3, first paragraph:

"A simple mechanism MUST enable the query of any data to return a  
valid reponse without  disclosing the unique Identifier of a specific  
organization. "

Is the requirement that such a mechanism must simply exist, or that  
the implementation must actually use it?

paragraphs 2 through end of section

"We suggest to use" should probably be recast as normative language.   
Also, I'd like to see a little more about how OpaqueIdentifier is to  
be used--I gather that the publisher needs to be able to correlate the  
OpaqueIdentifier with the original IncidentID Field in the future? If  
so, we should mention that.

Section 8.4:

I think we need a little more here--if you use a secure transport, do  
you still need application level crypto? Can you say a little more  
about what security properties are needed? Also, do you mean SSL or TLS?

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