Subject: Re: [dnsext] Adopting draft: draft-hoffman-dnssec-ecdsa-04.txt

From: Alfred Hönes <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2010 20:12:27 +0100 (MEZ)

At Thu, 09 Dec 2010 16:30:44 -0500, Olafur Gudmundsson wrote:
> Dear colleagues
>
> The chairs have received a request to adopt the following draft
> as a working group document
>   http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hoffman-dnssec-ecdsa-04
>
> The draft falls within the WG charter because it pertains to
> DNSSEC algorithm maintenance.
>
> The rules of the working group require that at least 5 members
> of the working group publicly state that they support adoption.
> If 5 people have not stepped forward by January 15'th the draft
> will not be adopted.
>
> Please read the document and say what changes are needed to get
> the document to be ready for advancement.

See [*] below.

> The plan is to dispose of this document in short order.
>
> Please comment on if this document should be for informational
> or standards track.
>
>      Olafur & Andrew
>
> PS: as always dispose means in this context, advance or explicitly
>     reject.

I have read the current draft version and am willing to further
contribute to this effort by review and discussion.

As I already had expressed in comments on a previous draft version
sent to this list, this is a very much needed building block for the
evolution of DNSSEC; it provides additional options for crypto-
algorithm agility in DNSSEC, and it does so with valuable, substantial
savings in DNSSEC RR sizes.  (The DNS packet space consumed by DNSSEC
RRs is an ongoing concern regarding DNSSEC deployment!)

Hence, DNSEXT should adopt this draft as a work item, and aim to
bring it on the Standards Track.  We have placed RFC 5933 on Std Track,
and it looks like the algorithms whose useage are specified in this
draft will likely see much widespread use than RFC 5933 signatures;
thus aiming at Informational in this case would not make sense to me.

[*] Regarding the coupling expressed in the tagged statement:

I'd have appreciated it very much if the two questions of adoption
and further improvements of a draft would not have been merged into
a single poll.

The former has to be concerned with whether
   a) the topic of the I-D is within charter of the WG, and
   b) there is enough interest and available manpower for reviews.
Olafur already has answered question a) in an affirmative manner,
and I fully agree.  This message is a contribution towards b).

IMO, the WG would be better served by quickly adopting the draft
and *then* discussing how it can be improved, because then the WG
has taken over effective change control over the memo.

Therefore, I defer further comments to distinct messages and only
note that the WG and leadership should make serious commitments for
efforts to counter the FUD against EC-related IPR claims, which
still persists at large in an IMHO incommensurate manner, and that
the WG needs to make an informed engineering decision regarding the
balance of gain in RR size and the amount of FUD we are willing to
reject.

For reference, I once more refer to draft-mcgrew-fundamental-ecc-04,
which currently is in IESG state "approved, announcement to be sent".
I'll dedicate a subsequent message to the applicability and
importance of the considerations in Appendix C of that document
to the design of the DNSKEY format to be used for ECDSA public keys
with DNSSEC.

Kind regards,
  Alfred Hönes.

-- 

+------------------------+--------------------------------------------+
| TR-Sys Alfred Hoenes   |  Alfred Hoenes   Dipl.-Math., Dipl.-Phys.  |
| Gerlinger Strasse 12   |  Phone: (+49)7156/9635-0, Fax: -18         |
| D-71254  Ditzingen     |  E-Mail:  [email-masked]                     |
+------------------------+--------------------------------------------+

_______________________________________________
dnsext mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsext