Last Call Review of draft-ietf-stox-presence-06
review-ietf-stox-presence-06-secdir-lc-laurie-2014-02-06-00

I have reviewed this document as part of the security directorate's
ongoing effort to review all IETF documents being processed by the
IESG.  These comments were written primarily for the benefit of the
security area directors.  Document editors and WG chairs should treat
these comments just like any other last call comments.

Summary: ready with nits

Detail: the I-D documents a mapping between two fairly well-matched
presence protocols, and hence does not introduce much danger. The one
area of concern is that SIP presence subscriptions are short-lived and
XMPP's are long-lived, thus opening the possibility of an
amplification attack against SIP via XMPP.

The suggested mitigation is weak:

"To help prevent such an attack, access to an XMPP-
   SIP gateway that is hosted on the XMPP network SHOULD be restricted
   to XMPP users associated with a single domain or trust realm (e.g., a
   gateway hosted at simple.example.com ought to allow only users within
   the example.com domain to access the gateway, not users within
   example.org, example.net, or any other domain)"

Many XMPP servers allow open registration and so this defence is no
defence at all in that case. Perhaps some kind of rate limitation
would be useful?

Also, this part:

"Furthermore, whenever an XMPP-SIP gateway seeks to refresh
   an XMPP user's long-lived subscription to a SIP user's presence, it
   MUST first send an XMPP <presence/> stanza of type "probe" from the
   address of the gateway to the "bare JID" (user at domain.tld) of the
   XMPP user, to which the user's XMPP server MUST respond in accordance
   with [RFC6121]; however, the administrator of an XMPP-SIP gateway MAY
   (based on local service provisioning) exempt "known good" XMPP
   servers from this check (e.g., the XMPP server associated with the
   XMPP-SIP gateway as described above)."

is unclear: how does it help?