Guidelines for Cryptographic Key Management
draft-bellovin-mandate-keymgmt-03

[Ballot comment]
> 2.2. Manual Key Management
>
>    Manual key management is a reasonable approach in any of these
>    situations:

should we s/is a/may be a/?

My concern is that the first example "limited bandwidth" is something
I hear a lot about, and I don't want folk to be able to say "see, this
document says we're a special case"

[Ballot comment]
Not a Discuss, but for a discussion at some point:

Is it possible to add to the reasons for not using automated key management that
an automated key management protocol is not available with suitable applicability
for the application environment?  (IKEv2 and IPSec are not ideal for every application
environment, but what other warm recommendation do we have for automated key
management for applications?)

Review by Scott Brim, Gen-ART

No serious objection, although here are some things you might consider.

- It lacks an IANA Considerations section.

- "There is not one answer to that question; circumstances differ.  In
  general, automated key management SHOULD be used.  Occasionally,
  relying on manual key management is reasonable; we propose some
  guidelines for making that judgment."

  This is a BCP -- I hope you're doing more than "proposing" guidelines
  :-).  "provide"?  "offer"?

- "Manual key management is used to distribute such values."

  s/is/can be/ ?

- "In particular, the protocol associated with an automated key
  management technique will confirm liveness of the peer, protect
  against replay, ..."

  s/will/can/ ?

- "Examples of automated key management systems include IPsec IKE and
  Kerberos."

  add commas

- "In general, automated key management SHOULD be used to establish
  session keys.  This is a very strong "SHOULD", meaning the
  justification is needed in the security considerations section of a
  proposal that makes use of manual key management."

  Grades of SHOULD will be difficult to referee.  I suggest: "A proposal
  MUST use automated key management to establish session keys unless
  adequate justification is provided in the Security Considerations
  section for the use of manual key management."

- "When manual key management is used, long-term shared secrets MUST be
  unpredictable "random" values ..."

  I would take out "unpredictable".  First it's redundant with "random"
  and second we have the same problems generating unpredictable values
  as we do random ones.