Subject: [Gen-art] Gen-ART review of draft-ietf-tls-downgrade-scsv-03

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 12:19:55 -0500

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>.

This review is in response to a request for early Gen-ART review.

Document: draft-ietf-tls-downgrade-scsv-03
Reviewer: Russ Housley
Review Date: 2015-01-19
IETF LC End Date: 2015-01-23
IESG Telechat date: unknown

Summary: Almost Ready.

Major Concerns:

None.

Minor Concerns:

The upper-right corner of the title page and the abstract disagree.  One
says that this document updates 3 RFCs, and the other says that it
updates 4 RFCs.  I think that both are wrong based on this text from the
introduction:

   This specification applies to implementations of TLS 1.0 [RFC2246],
   TLS 1.1 [RFC4346], and TLS 1.2 [RFC5246], and to implementations of
   DTLS 1.0 [RFC4347] and DTLS 1.2 [RFC6347].

Please correct the title page header and the abstract.

Other Comments:

In the introduction, I suggest the following editorial change to improve
clarity:

OLD:

   ... they can be particularly critical if they mean losing the
   TLS extension feature (when downgrading to SSL 3.0).

NEW:

   ... they can be particularly harmful when the result is loss of the
   TLS extension feature by downgrading to SSL 3.0.

Further down in the introduction, there is a missing word:

OLD:

   ... is not suitable substitute ...

NEW:

   ... is not a suitable substitute ...