Subject: Document Action: Security Requirements for Keys used with the TCP MD5 Signature Option to Informational

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 14:37:03 -0400

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'Security Requirements for 
Keys used with the TCP MD5 Signature Option' 
<draft-ietf-idr-md5-keys-00.txt> as an Informational RFC.  This 
document is the product of the Inter-Domain Routing Working Group.  The 
IESG contact persons are Bill Fenner and Alex Zinin.

RFC Editor Note:

Please change the title to "Key Management Considerations for the
TCP MD5 Signature Option".

Please change the following:

In section 3, the first bullet:
OLD:
      o Key lengths SHOULD be between 12 and 24 bytes, with larger keys
        having effectively zero cost when compared to shorter keys.

NEW:
      o Key lengths SHOULD be between 12 and 24 bytes, with larger keys
        having effectively zero additional computational cost when
                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
        compared to shorter keys.

In section 5, first paragraph:

OLD:
  this option may have lifetimes on the order of months.  It would seem
  prudent, then, to choose a *minimum* key length that guarantees that
  key-guessing runtimes are some reasonable [3-5??] multiple of the
  key-change interval under best-case (for the attacker) practical

NEW:
  this option may have lifetimes on the order of months.  It would seem
  prudent, then, to choose a minimum key length that guarantees that
                              ^^^^^^^ (remove emphasis)
  key-guessing runtimes are some small multiple of the key-change
                                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  interval under best-case (for the attacker) practical

In section 6, first paragraph:

OLD:
  that the reasonable upper-bound for software-based attack performance
  is 1.0e13 MD5 operations per second, then the *minimum* required key
  entropy is approximately 68 bits.  It is reasonable to round this

NEW:
  that the reasonable upper-bound for software-based attack performance
  is 1.0e13 MD5 operations per second, then the minimum required key
                                                ^^^^^^^ (remove emphasis)
  entropy is approximately 68 bits.  It is reasonable to round this