Re: [psg.com #460] IESG - Transport - Oakley - new proposal (fwd)

[nisse%lysator.liu.se@localhost (Niels Möller)]

Damien Miller <djm%mindrot.org@localhost> writes:

> I think that we should just change the drafts to read "RFC3526 group 14"
> instead of "oakley group 14". The RFC isn't going to change
> retrospectively and it seems like total overkill to set up an IANA
> registry for a couple of groups, especially if DHGEX is going to be
> preferred in the future.

I'm sorry if I haven't been following the group closely enough
recently, but now I'm confused. I thought the entire purpose of the
secsh-numbers document was to specify an IANA registry for ssh-related
names and numbers. The creation of that new registry seems totally
orthogonal to whether or not we try to keep some of the numbers in the
registry somehow in "sync" with the ipsec iana registry.

As for the appropriateness of the name "oakley group 14" for our
group, I have been assuming that the group, and the name "group 14",
originates in some paper (outside of the RFC series), together with
some motivation and analysis of the method by which the primes were
selected. I would have expected a reference to such a paper in RFC
2412 and RFC 3526, but I can't seem to find any.

If that's not the case, I'd have to agree with Tero that it doesn't
make much sense to copy arbitrary numbers from the ipsec iana registry
into our registry.

Can any onebody shed some light on the origins of the "oakley groups"
and their names?

Confusedly yours,
/Niels

PS. And also "RFC3526 group 14" doesn't make much sense to me; the
motivation for the "group14" naming we've been discussing have been to
make it *easily* generalizable to new groups that appear in some well
defined (by somebody else) series. Doing that, and then referring to a
fix document like RFC3526 defining precisely 6 groups for the
definition of the supposedly growing series, makes it all pretty
pointless.

PPS. I've been on vacation off the net for a few weeks. Hence my late
comments.