Last Call Review of draft-josefsson-pkix-textual-07
review-josefsson-pkix-textual-07-secdir-lc-nystrom-2014-12-04-00

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.

This memo documents textual encodings of various well-established PKI-related
data structures and formats. The document is intended to be published as a
Standards-Track RFC.

Comments and suggestions:

Section 5.1:

 - For clarity and common keyword usage, suggest replacing "The encoded data
 MUST be a BER (DER strongly preferred) encoded ASN.1..." with: "The encoded
 data MUST be BER and SHOULD be a DER encoded ASN.1..." (In fact this comment
 goes for all places where you have text like "MUST be a BER (DER [strongly]
 preferred" - better to use established RFC 2119 language).

- I wonder why you state "Parsers are NOT
   RECOMMENDED to treat "X509 CERTIFICATE" or "X.509 CERTIFICATE" as
   equivalent to "CERTIFICATE", but a valid exception may be for
   backwards compatibility (potentially together with a warning)" since to my
   knowledge, they all refer to the same structure and in the spirit of "strict
   in issuance, generous in receipt", it would seem to be better to state:
   ""Parsers MAY treat ... as equivalent to "CERTIFICATE" " ?

- I also wonder about the warning above since if the structure indeed does
parse as a certificate, what value would the warning bring (and to whom)?

Section 5.3:

I disagree with the deprecation of .cer in favor of .crt. The .cer convention
is used broadly. I would suggest updating the text to recommend use of .crt OR
.cer. Better yet, remove the section, since this document specifically is about
textual encodings and not file extension naming and you do not discuss
extension naming elsewhere.

Section 6:

Same comments as for Section 5.1 above, but for CRLs...

Section 7:

Same comment as my first for Section 5.1. I note that you have the same
language with regards to parser flexibility here that I have suggested for
Section 5.1 and Section 6.

Security Considerations:

No particular comments.



-- Magnus