Title: Response to Liaison Statement on ITU-T Recommendation X.1034
Submission Date: 2008-09-11
URL of the IETF Web page: 
https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/liaison_detail.cgi?detail_id=470 

From: Joseph Salowey(IETF EMU WG) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: ITU-T SG 17([EMAIL PROTECTED] ,[EMAIL PROTECTED])
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
emu@ietf.org
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reponse Contact: emu@ietf.org
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Technical Contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Purpose: In response 
Body: The EAP Method update (EMU) working group in the IETF has reviewed the 
document "ITU-T Recommendation X.1034" that is the subject of a liaison 
statement submitted on 2008-08-06. Does the ITU-T have further plans in this 
area, such as more EAP method analysis or definition?  If so, perhaps more 
coordination between the IETF and the ITU-T in this area is needed.  The 
members of EMU WG provided the following comments, which we hope are useful in 
finalizing the contents of X.1034.

A. Comments on section 3.2

1. It is not clear if the definition of PFS aligns with the definition in other 
documents such as from the "Handbook of applied cryptography" 
(http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/about/chap12.pdf).

2. The server compromised-based attack appears not to be an attack, but rather 
a way to mitigate the server compromised attack.  These definitions are not 
clear. 

B. Comments on section 6.1

1. In figure 1 - Replace TDP with TCP, SCP with SCTP and "UDP or IP" with "UDP 
over IP" 
2. Throughout the document replace DIAMETER with Diameter.
3. The following sentence is misleading: "the authenticator exchanges random 
numbers with the supplicant to obtain a fresh cryptographic key; thus resulting 
in perfect forward secrecy." Fresh keys are not sufficient to fulfill the 
criteria for PFS. 

C. Comments on section 7.2 and 7.5

1. The "Prevention of domino effect or Denning Sacco attack" is a property of 
the system and not specific to the EAP method.  
2. Authorization is not communicated in EAP.  It is communicated from the 
Authentication server to the authenticator based on the identity authenticated 
by EAP.  
3. The requirement for "Protection against server compromised dictionary 
attack" is not clear.  If encrypted storage is all that is necessary then why 
is this a property of a protocol and not just a specific implementation detail? 
 
4. Section 7.5 states that the appendix can be used to select from many 
existing EAP methods, however section I only analyzes a small subset of EAP 
methods. 

D. Comments on table I-1:

General: EAP-MD5 and EAP-SRP are not widely deployed.  This section claims to 
analyze "well-known" EAP methods, however it only analyzes two of the many 
methods that are deployed.  There are EAP methods that provide additional 
properties but they are not listed in the table. There are more detailed 
investigations available, such as 
http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~y0013790/thesis-otto-eapmethods.pdf. 

1. EAP-SRP 

i.      EAP-SRP is not defined in RFC 2945.  There is no current documentation 
for an EAP-SRP (There was a draft that expired many years ago).  It is not 
clear what this evaluation was done against.   


2. EAP-MD5 

i.      EAP-MD5 does not provide mutual authentication or resistance to 
dictionary attacks 
ii.     EAP-MD5 does not provide protection from dictionary attacks.  EAP-MD5 
can be used with passwords.
iii.    In general EAP-MD5 is not very useful since it does not generate 
session keys. It would be more appropriate to include EAP-GPSK. 

4. EAP-TLS 

i.      EAP-TLS Can provide user identity privacy (RFC 5216, section 2.1.4) 
ii.     EAP-TLS provides fragmentation support 
iii.    EAP-TLS does not use passwords and hence it is more appropriate to say 
that password-based issues are not applicable.
iv.     RFC 5216 provides unique naming for keys and sessions for EAP-TLS

5. EAP-AKA 

i.      EAP-AKA provides support for user privacy 
ii.     EAP-AKA does not use passwords and hence it is more appropriate to say 
that this issue is not applicable.
iii.    RFC 5247 provides unique naming for keys and sessions in EAP-AKA

E. Comments on Bibliography

1. RFC-2716 is obsolete, EAP-TLS is defined in RFC 5216 
2. draft-ietf-eapkeying-21.txt has been published as RFC 5247
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