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Last Call Review of draft-ietf-tls-external-psk-guidance-03
review-ietf-tls-external-psk-guidance-03-opsdir-lc-bradner-2021-11-15-00

Request Review of draft-ietf-tls-external-psk-guidance
Requested revision No specific revision (document currently at 06)
Type Last Call Review
Team Ops Directorate (opsdir)
Deadline 2021-11-19
Requested 2021-10-29
Authors Russ Housley , Jonathan Hoyland , Mohit Sethi , Christopher A. Wood
Draft last updated 2021-11-15
Completed reviews Opsdir Last Call review of -03 by Scott O. Bradner (diff)
Artart Last Call review of -03 by Martin Thomson (diff)
Secdir Last Call review of -03 by Rich Salz (diff)
Secdir Telechat review of -04 by Rich Salz (diff)
Assignment Reviewer Scott O. Bradner
State Completed
Review review-ietf-tls-external-psk-guidance-03-opsdir-lc-bradner-2021-11-15
Posted at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ops-dir/P_CkkA4PLC93DFZUE_haEMDNTTY
Reviewed revision 03 (document currently at 06)
Result Has Nits
Completed 2021-11-15
review-ietf-tls-external-psk-guidance-03-opsdir-lc-bradner-2021-11-15-00
This is an OPS-DIR review of Guidance for External PSK Usage in TLS
<draft-ietf-tls-external-psk-guidance>.

As its title indicates, this ID provides guidance for the use of pre-shared
keys with TLS. Guidance documents are inherently useful to operations community
and this is no exception.

I found the document well written, slightly repetitive as Rich noted, but not
so much so as for it to be an issue for me.

A few notes though.

in section 4.2 the term PAKE is used without any definition – there is a
reference to a document but it seems to be that at least expanding the term in
this document would be useful.

the document uses the term SHOULD in a number of places.  (e.g. multiple places
in section 7 and one in section 8) – for what its worth – I am not a fan of the
use of this term unless the text also says when not doing what the SHOULD says
to do is OK – i.e. since SHOULD is a MUST with an escape clause – I think it is
useful to actually say what the escape clause is – i.e. explain why this is not
a MUST.  (also it does seem a bit funky to say (as section 7 does) “MUST
adhere” to requirements which are SHOULDs )