RE: RADEXT Milestone revisions

["Bernard Aboba" <bernard_aboba@hotmail.com>]

The crypto-agility work item will focus on the negotiation of cryptographic 
algorithms within existing RADIUS security mechanisms.

As has been discussed recently in SAAG, the recent attacks against popular 
hashes such as MD5 and SHA1 have raised awareness of this problem.  The IETF 
will be undertaking work on crypto-agility within a number of protocols, 
including TLS.  It has been suggested that the issue is serious in RADIUS 
because the protocol uses straight MD5 in places, rather than HMAC-MD5 or 
HMAC-SHA1.  Given the rate of advance of hash attacks, and the lag time 
involved in producing standards, it is best to get work on RADIUS 
crypto-agility underway sooner rather than later.

Note that this work item does not require solving all the security problems 
in RADIUS, just providing support for the negotiation of algorithms within 
exitsing security mechanisms.  For example, issues relating to end-to-end 
encryption of RADIUS attributes or integration of RADIUS and Kerberos are 
out of scope.  It is also not an explicit goal to enable RADIUS to be 
certified for FIPS 140-2, although support for negotiation of FIPS approved 
algorithms is likely to be an end result.



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