[OSPF] Gen-ART review of draft-ietf-ospf-hmac-sha-05

[Acee Lindem <acee at redback.com>]

David Black's General Area Review Team (Gen-ART) comments on draft- 
ietf-ospf-hmac-sha-05.txt are attached:


I have been selected as the General Area Review Team (Gen-ART)
reviewer for this draft (for background on Gen-ART, please see
http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/gen/art/gen-art-FAQ.html).

Please resolve these comments along with any other Last Call
comments you may receive.

Document: draft-ietf-ospf-hmac-sha-05
Reviewer: David L. Black
Review Date: July 20, 2009
IETF LC End Date: July 20, 2009

Summary:

This draft is basically ready for publication, but has nits
that should be fixed before publication.

Comments:

This draft extends OSPFv2 cryptographic authentication to use
keyed HMACs based on the NIST secure hash standard family of
hashes (SHA-*).  The draft is solidly written, and is a
reasonably straightforward application of HMAC and the SHA-*
hashes to OSPFv2.  The draft is in good shape - all of my
comments are minor.

I wonder whether the "SHOULD" requirement for implementation
in Section 3 ought to include HMAC-SHA-224 and HMAC-SHA-384.
I would have stated requirements for these two hashes as "MAY"
in order to encourage use of either HMAC-SHA-256 or HMAC-SHA-512
when HMAC-SHA-1 is insufficient, but this is a judgment call.
To avoid confusion, this is a request that the authors think
about this topic; it is *not* a comment that the requirement
needs to be changed.  If the authors believe that the current
"SHOULD" requirements for these two hashes are the right
approach, that is acceptable to me.

In Section 3.2, it would be useful for the draft to say that an
OSPFv2 Security Association is not set up inband via OSPFv2, in
contrast to an IPsec Security Association created via IKE.  Among
the reasons that this should be done is that the term "OSPFv2
Security Association" is introduced in this draft - that term
does not occur in RFC 2328, even though Section D.3 of RFC 2328
defines an abstraction for which "OSPFv2 Security Association"
is an appropriate name.  I recommend stating that this term is
new to this draft.

The mention of IP Security in the next to last paragraph of
the Security Considerations (section 4) should cite an
informative reference, RFC 4301 would be appropriate.

idnits 2.11.12 did not find any issues.

Thanks,
--David
----------------------------------------------------
David L. Black, Distinguished Engineer
EMC Corporation, 176 South St., Hopkinton, MA  01748
+1 (508) 293-7953             FAX: +1 (508) 293-7786
black_david at emc.com        Mobile: +1 (978) 394-7754
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