Subject: [Suit] Martin Duke's No Objection on draft-ietf-suit-architecture-14: (with COMMENT)

From: Martin Duke via Datatracker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2020 13:46:50 -0700

Martin Duke has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-suit-architecture-14: No Objection

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COMMENT:
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Thank you for engaging with the TSVART review.

I think Bob's criticism that certain aspects of what is critical, vs.
nice-to-have are ambiguous.

For example, in Section 1:

"The firmware update process has to ensure that

   -  The firmware image is authenticated and integrity protected.
      Attempts to flash a maliciously modified firmware image or an
      image from an unknown, untrusted source must be prevented.  In
      examples this document uses asymmetric cryptography because it is
      the preferred approach by many IoT deployments.  The use of
      symmetric credentials is also supported and can be used by very
      constrained IoT devices.

   -  The firmware image can be confidentiality protected so that
      attempts by an adversary to recover the plaintext binary can be
      mitigated or at least made more difficult.  Obtaining the firmware
      is often one of the first steps to mount an attack since it gives
      the adversary valuable insights into the software libraries used,
      configuration settings and generic functionality.  Even though
      reverse engineering the binary can be a tedious process modern
      reverse engineering frameworks have made this task a lot easier."

The construction of this excerpt suggests that confidentiality is mandatory,
but I gather from the thread that it is not.

If it is mandatory, than please change the second bullet to read "The firmware
image is confidentiality protected..."

If it is not mandatory, I would just combine the first bullet and the opening
clause, and make the second bullet an independent paragraph.