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Telechat Review of draft-ietf-pce-rfc6006bis-03
review-ietf-pce-rfc6006bis-03-secdir-telechat-kaufman-2017-08-31-00

Request Review of draft-ietf-pce-rfc6006bis
Requested revision No specific revision (document currently at 04)
Type Telechat Review
Team Security Area Directorate (secdir)
Deadline 2017-08-29
Requested 2017-08-10
Authors Quintin Zhao , Dhruv Dhody , Ramanjaneya Reddy Palleti , Daniel King
Draft last updated 2017-08-31
Completed reviews Secdir Telechat review of -03 by Charlie Kaufman (diff)
Rtgdir Last Call review of -02 by Ben Niven-Jenkins (diff)
Genart Last Call review of -03 by Roni Even (diff)
Opsdir Last Call review of -03 by Fred Baker (diff)
Assignment Reviewer Charlie Kaufman
State Completed
Review review-ietf-pce-rfc6006bis-03-secdir-telechat-kaufman-2017-08-31
Reviewed revision 03 (document currently at 04)
Result Has Nits
Completed 2017-08-31
review-ietf-pce-rfc6006bis-03-secdir-telechat-kaufman-2017-08-31-00
I have reviewed this document as part of the security directorate's ongoing
effort to review all IETF documents being processed by the IESG. Document
editors and WG chairs should treat these comments just like any other last call
comments.

Summary: No significant security issues

This document is a "refreshing" of rfc6006 (Extensions to PCEP for
Point-to-Multipoint Traffic Engineering Label Switched Paths) to incorporate
errata that have accumulated over the last seven years. There may be some small
additional changes.

One minor change was made to Security considerations, and it was a good change,
but I fear makes the security considerations somewhat internally inconsistent.
That change was to change a recommendation to use TCP-AO to a recommendation to
use TLS. TLS is a more logical protocol to use in this context, but the
security considerations also references RFC5440, what mandates TCP-MD5 and
recommends TCP-AO (which was not available when RFC5440 was written).

I'm not sure the best way to resolve this... probably to leave it as is.
Someday, RFC5440 should be updated.

Security considerations in this document discusses that dangers of someone
impersonating a client for the purpose of denying service or learning about the
network configuration, and RFC5440 talks about that dangers of eavesdropping in
learning what the client is doing. It does not discuss whether there are
important threats posed by someone impersonating a PCEP server and returning
bad routing information. I suspect that might be a more serious threat then
either of the other attacks, but don't know enough about how the protocol is
used to know for sure.

In any case, all the considerations mentioned above probably belong in RFC5440
(PCEP) rather than this document concerning extensions.

 --Charlie Kaufman