Benjamin Kaduk has entered the following ballot position for draft-ietf-regext-allocation-token-09: Discuss
When responding, please keep the subject line intact and reply to all email addresses included in the To and CC lines. (Feel free to cut this introductory paragraph, however.) Please refer to https://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/discuss-criteria.html for more information about IESG DISCUSS and COMMENT positions. The document, along with other ballot positions, can be found here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-regext-allocation-token/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- DISCUSS: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (I agree with Ekr's DISCUSS about these being bearer tokens and am happy to see the discussion on improving the text there.) There are a couple of other things that I seek discussion on: The document itself does very little to motivate the addition of the allocation token, from a security point of view. In what security model is there a security advantage from having this sort of single-use authorization token as opposed to using existing authentication and authorization methods? The use case of a premium domain-name auction that came up in Ekr's ballot thread is actually quite enlightening, in that the token allows for the authorization to be granted to the winner of an auction even in the case where the winning bidder and the current registration owner do not have any common authentication or authorization infrastructure (other than for the auction and its payment itself). Some generalization of these considerations into a model that matches the generalized functionality in the draft would be a quite helpful addition. This could also be leveraged in the discussion of why the allocation token is not needed in the various commands for which its usage is not provided (mentioned in my COMMENT). I also request changes to the examples (or the discussion surrounding them). Using "abc123" as the example allocation token is probably unwise, as that value provides none of the properties we desire from allocation tokens. If you don't want to use an actual random-looking (e.g., self-encrypted server-generated) or signed value because it makes the examples too long, at least provide some text indicating that "abc123" is a placeholder and real tokens should have a different structure. Similarly, the passwords used in the examples hardly have enough entropy to be considered secure by modern standards. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- COMMENT: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (section-by-section) Section 1 A client MUST pass an Allocation Token known to the server to be authorized to use one of the supported EPP transform commands. It is up to server policy which EPP transform commands and which objects require the Allocation Token. The language could probably be tightened up for greater clarity about when the MUST applies, and perhaps be consistent about "supported" vs. "require" between sentences. Section 1.1 represents lines returned by a protocol server. Indentation and white space in examples are provided only to illustrate element relationships and are not a REQUIRED feature of this protocol. It would be nice to rephrase this so that "NOT REQUIRED" could be together/majuscule. Maybe, "to illustrate element relationships and implementations are NOT REQUIRED to adhere to such whitespace and formatting"? The XML namespace prefix "allocationToken" is used for the namespace "urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:allocationToken-1.0", but implementations MUST NOT depend on it and instead employ a proper namespace-aware XML parser and serializer to interpret and output the XML documents. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't this kind-of inviting sloppy implementations that don't check? Sometimes we say things like "this prefix is used in the examples for concision but actual usage is expected to vary between fully scoped and shortened versions". Section 3.1.1 2. If an object requires an Allocation Token and the Allocation Token does not apply to the object or an object does not require an Allocation Token, then the server SHOULD return the availability status as unavailable (e.g., "avail" attribute is "0" or "false"). It's really unclear why these two cases are not distinguished in a machine-readable way (i.e., not the text of the reason). (Also in 3.2.4, etc.) Section 3.1.2 [...] Authorized clients MAY retrieve the Allocation Token (Section 2.1) along with the other object information using the <allocationToken:info> element. [...] The causality here is a bit weird; it seems like the client is requesting to retrieve the token by including <allocationToken:info> in its request so that the server knows to include it in the response (where it is retrieved from an <allocationToken:allocationToken> element). If the query was successful, the server replies with an <allocationToken:allocationToken> element, as described in Section 2.1. Section 2.1 describes the contents of the element, not how the server replies with it. Maybe, "interpreted as described in" would be better? Section 3.1.3 It would probably be good to have some discussion of why the <transfer> query command (as opposed to transform command) does not benefit from having this additional authorization-checking mechanism. Section 3.2.1 The EPP <create> command provides a transform operation that allows a client to create an instance of an object. In addition to the EPP command elements described in an object mapping like [RFC5731], the command MUST contain a child <allocationToken:allocationToken> This MUST is only for the cases when an allocation token is to be used, right? (Similarly in 3.2.4, etc.) element for the client to be authorized to create and allocate the object. If the Allocation Token does not apply to the object, the server MUST return an EPP error result code of 2201. nit: Maybe "supplied Allocation Token"? Section 3.2.2, 3.2.3, 3.2.5 Similarly to for Section 3.1.3, some text on why the additional authorization is not useful would be helpful. Section 4.1 <annotation> <documentation> Extensible Provisioning Protocol v1.0 Allocation Token Extension. </documentation> </annotation> nit: are this many line breaks needed? I also question the minLength of 1 for an allocation token value. Why couldn't it be more like 16 or even 32? I would put this in the DISCUSS section but maybe there are mitgating circumstances I'm unaware of. _______________________________________________ regext mailing list regext@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/regext
