Subject: [Gen-art] Gen-ART review of draft-melnikov-smime-msa-to-mda-03

From: "Vijay K. Gurbani" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 09:57:40 -0600

I am the assigned Gen-ART reviewer for this draft. For background on
Gen-ART, please see the FAQ at
<http://wiki.tools.ietf.org/area/gen/trac/wiki/GenArtfaq>.

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

Document: draft-melnikov-smime-msa-to-mda-03
Reviewer: Vijay K. Gurbani
Review Date: Feb-25-2014
IETF LC End Date: Mar-05-2014
IESG Telechat date: Unknown

I must say that this draft was written with implementors in mind.
This is very refreshing.

Major: 0
Minor: 0
Nits:  4

This document is ready as a Proposed Standard.  Some minor nits follow:

Nits:

- S2.2, "Organizational policy and good security practice often
  require that messages be reviewed before they are released to
  external recipients."  Here, I suspect that organizational policy may
  require such a vetting but I would think that "good security practice"
  would not.  After all, unless a party is forced to do so (the
  "organizational policy" part), why would one party willingly subject
  its private communications to a third party before sending it
  to the recipient?  I would not consider that a third party reading
  my messages a "good security practice".  Therefore, I would take
  the "good security practice" phrase out, unless of course, there is
  some context to that phrase that I am not privy to.

- S3.3, first sentence: "A 'domain signature' is a signature generated
  on behalf of a set of users in the domain the users are a member of."
  This sentence appears rather, for the lack of a better word, clunky.
  How about rewriting this as: "A 'domain signature' is a signature
  generated on behalf of a set of users who belong to the specific
  domain."

- S5, steps 3-A and 3-B: s/found then/found, then/
  There are some more occurences of this, if you feel like it, you may
  want to change these to have a comma as well.

- S7, first paragraph: s/permits masquerade./permits masquerading./
   or, s/permits masquerade attacks./

Thanks,

- vijay
-- 
Vijay K. Gurbani, Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent
1960 Lucent Lane, Rm. 9C-533, Naperville, Illinois 60563 (USA)
Email: vkg@{bell-labs.com,acm.org} / [email-masked]
Web: http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/vkg/  | Calendar: http://goo.gl/x3Ogq

---

From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 18:40:18 +0000

> This document is ready as a Proposed Standard.  Some minor nits follow:
Hi Vijay,
Thank you for your review.

>  some context to that phrase that I am not privy to.
I think this is a rather subjective topic: what one party (an 
enterprise/organization) considers "good" practice might indeed not be 
considered "good" by the sender. I am happy to remove "good" from the 
sentence.

>  generated on behalf of a set of users who belong to the specific
Yes, your version is better. Changed.

>  want to change these to have a comma as well.
Changed.
>   or, s/permits masquerade attacks./
Changed.

Best Regards,
Alexey

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From: "Vijay K. Gurbani" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 13:04:07 -0600

> Thank you for your review.

Alexey: No worries.

> considered "good" by the sender. I am happy to remove "good" from the

Perfect; that works for me.

Thanks for incorporating the remaining changes.

Cheers,

- vijay