Reclassification of Suite B Documents to Historic Status
draft-housley-suite-b-to-historic-05

Note added 'Here is what I propose for an IESG note to clarify IESG review comments

"Suite B algorithms are defined to support two minimum levels of
  security: 128 and 192 bits.  It is believed that the Suite B
  algorithms continue to meet these security goals.  The algorithm
  identifiers for all of the Suite B algorithms remain available for
  anyone that wants to use them."'

[Ballot comment]
Section 2 seems to implicitly assume that the only reason one would want to use
Suite B crypto is to comply with NSA/US Government requirements.
One could imagine that this is not always true; can we give more
guidance on why it's okay to hang out to dry such (hypothetical)
other consumers of Suite B (or why they are believed to be nonexistent)?

[Ballot comment]
I support the intent of this document. After looking at [CNSA] it took me some time to realize that although Suite B is moved to historic, the underlying cryptographic mechanisms are not considered broken (even if some of them are not recommended). For example, ECDH on Curve P-384 is present in both Suite B and CNSA.

So can I suggest that you add a sentence to the Abstract saying that while Suite B as a profile is declared historic, the underlying mechanisms are not necessarily historic. People who don't read beyond the Abstract might draw wrong conclusion otherwise!

[Ballot comment]
Thanks to the authors for their work on this document.
I found two very small editorial nits that should be fixed
if any further changes to the document are made.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

§4:

>  Other RFC make reference to these Suite-B-related RFCs; these
>  references are discussed in the following subsections.

Nit: "Other RFCs..."


---------------------------------------------------------------------------

§4.3:

>  RFC 7321, "Cryptographic Algorithm Implementation Requirements and
>  Usage Guidance for Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) and
>  Authentication Header (AH) [RFC7321], points out that the AES-GCM

Nit: missing closing quotation mark.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

§4.5:

>  RFC 8253, "PCEPS: Usage of TLS to Provide a Secure Transport for the
>  Path Computation Element Communication Protocol (PCEP)" [RFC8253],
>  points RFC 6460 for the TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 and
>  TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 cipher suites.  Both of these
>  ciphersuites are defined in [RFC5289], which would have been a better
>  reference.

Not a comment for this document as much as a suggestion for further action by
the authors: is it worth filing an erratum on RFC 8253 to fix this?

(Via drafts-lastcall@iana.org): IESG/Authors/WG Chairs:

The IANA Services Operator has reviewed draft-housley-suite-b-to-historic-04, which is currently in Last Call, and has the following comments:

We understand that this document doesn't require any registry actions.

While it's often helpful for a document's IANA Considerations section to remain in place upon publication even if there are no actions, if the authors strongly prefer to remove it, we do not object.

If this assessment is not accurate, please respond as soon as possible.

Thank you,

Sabrina Tanamal
Senior IANA Services Specialist

The following Last Call announcement was sent out (ends 2018-04-24):

From: The IESG
To: IETF-Announce
CC: ekr@rtfm.com, draft-housley-suite-b-to-historic@ietf.org, sean@sn3rd.com
Reply-To: ietf@ietf.org
Sender:
Subject: Last Call:  (Reclassification of Suite B Documents to Historic Status) to Informational RFC


The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider the
following document: - 'Reclassification of Suite B Documents to Historic
Status'
  as Informational RFC

The Last Call for the document draft-housley-suite-b-to-historic is related to
the status change document, also in Last Call, for status-change-suiteb-to-historic.

The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits final
comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the
ietf@ietf.org mailing lists by 2018-04-24. Exceptionally, comments may be
sent to iesg@ietf.org instead. In either case, please retain the beginning of
the Subject line to allow automated sorting.

Abstract


  This document reclassifies the RFCs related to the U.S.  National
  Security Agency (NSA) Suite B cryptographic algorithms as Historic,
  and it discusses the reasons for doing so.  This document moves seven
  informational RFCs to Historic Status: RFC 5759, RFC 6239, RFC 6318,
  RFC 6379, RFC 6380, RFC 6403, and RFC 6460.  In addition, this
  document moves three obsolete informational RFCs to Historic Status:
  RFC 4869, RFC 5008, and RFC 5430.




The file can be obtained via
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-housley-suite-b-to-historic/

IESG discussion can be tracked via
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-housley-suite-b-to-historic/ballot/


No IPR declarations have been submitted directly on this I-D.

(Via drafts-lastcall@iana.org): IESG/Authors/WG Chairs:

The IANA Services Operator has reviewed draft-housley-suite-b-to-historic-03, which is currently in Last Call, and has the following comments:

We understand that this document doesn't require any registry actions.

While it's often helpful for a document's IANA Considerations section to remain in place upon publication even if there are no actions, if the authors strongly prefer to remove it, we do not object.

If this assessment is not accurate, please respond as soon as possible.

Thank you,

Amanda Baber
Lead IANA Services Specialist

The following Last Call announcement was sent out (ends 2018-03-16):

From: The IESG
To: IETF-Announce
CC: ekr@rtfm.com, draft-housley-suite-b-to-historic@ietf.org, sean@sn3rd.com
Reply-To: ietf@ietf.org
Sender:
Subject: Last Call:  (Reclassification of Suite B Documents to Historic Status) to Informational RFC


The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider the
following document: - 'Reclassification of Suite B Documents to Historic
Status'
  as Informational RFC

The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits final
comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the
ietf@ietf.org mailing lists by 2018-03-16. Exceptionally, comments may be
sent to iesg@ietf.org instead. In either case, please retain the beginning of
the Subject line to allow automated sorting.

Abstract


  This document reclassifies the RFCs related to the U.S.  National
  Security Agency (NSA) Suite B cryptographic algorithms as Historic,
  and it discusses the reasons for doing so.  This document moves seven
  informational RFCs to Historic Status: RFC 5759, RFC 6239, RFC 6318,
  RFC 6379, RFC 6380, RFC 6403, and RFC 6460.  In addition, this
  document moves three obsolete informational RFCs to Historic Status:
  RFC 4869, RFC 5008, and RFC 5430.




The file can be obtained via
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-housley-suite-b-to-historic/

IESG discussion can be tracked via
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-housley-suite-b-to-historic/ballot/


No IPR declarations have been submitted directly on this I-D.