Subject: [NGO] NETCONF over TLS document (Proposed Re-charting of NETCONF WG)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:04:47 +0200 (CEST)

[Apologies for multiple reception]

Dear all,

I submitted a new version of "NETCONF over TLS" that (Staging URL:
http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/staging/draft-badra-tls-netconf-04.txt):

a) includes comments from Eric Rescorla since I asked Eric to review the
document (his comments are given below). Thanks Eric.

b) supports the Notification draft (the <notification> elements are also
mentioned).

As the NETCONF WG re-chartering is discussed right now and since some
documents are currently not considered in scope for re-charting at this
time, I’d hope there will be consensus to take on the document and I'd
like to have more comments and discussion on the document for adoption as
WG item.

Best regards,
Badra

           ===== Eric Rescorla review =====

$Id: draft-badra-tls-netconf-03-rev.txt,v 1.1 2007/10/08 16:31:02 ekr Exp $

This draft seems conceptually sound. That said, the NETCONF WG made a
deliberate decision to use SSH rather than TLS. I don't fully understand
why they made that decision, but I wonder how receptive they are going to
be to a TLS proposal.

I see a bunch of SHOULDs that really should be MUSTs. In particular, TLS
requires clarity about which side is which, so in S 2.1. where you talk
about which side is the client and which the server, these should be MUST.

  When a party has received the close_notify alert from the other
  party and still has pending data to send, it SHOULD send the
  pending  data before sending the close_notify alert.

This violates RFC 4346:

  Unless some other fatal alert has been transmitted, each party
  is required to send a close_notify alert before closing the write
  side of the connection.  The other party MUST respond with a
  close_notify alert of its own and close down the connection
  immediately, discarding any pending writes.  It is not required
  for the initiator of the close to wait for the responding
  close_notify alert before closing the read side of the connection.

ISTM that the security considerations here could use some work. What are
the security guarantees required, esp. for upper-level authentication.

           ===== The review end=====

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