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Re: Evaluation: draft-ietf-sigtran-security - Security Considerations for SIGTRAN Protocols to Proposed Standard



re phase 1 applying to IP addresses (?), not services:

1) is this a fatal flaw in IKE?
2) since IPSec is supposed to be able to support multiple key mechanisms, should this draft restate its concern as "IKE is considerably less flexible than TLS"?

Harald

--On 17. april 2003 11:09 -0400 "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@research.att.com> wrote:

In message
<7D5D48D2CAA3D84C813F5B154F43B155016A308F@nl0006exch001u.nl.lucent.c om>,
"Wijnen, Bert (Bert)" writes:
                    Yes    No-Objection  Discuss *  Abstain
Bert Wijnen         [   ]     [   ]       [ X ]      [   ]
On page 9 I read (2nd para):
  Note that IPSec is considerably less flexible than TLS when it comes
  to configuring root CAs. Since use of Port identifiers is prohibited
  within IKE Phase 1, within IPSec it is not possible to uniquely
  configure trusted root CAs for each application individually; the
same policy must be used for all applications. This implies, for
example, that a root CA trusted for use with a SIGTRAN protocol must
also be trusted to protect SNMP. These restrictions can be awkward at
  best.

I have marked a few lines with >>
Can someone explain to me how it "implies" or "follows that the
SIGTRAN protocol must also be trusted to protect SNMP. I guess I cannot
find the proper context as to how SNMP plays a role here.

It's not SNMP per se, it's any service.

There are no port numbers specified in an IKE Phase 1 exchange, which
means that given a Phase 1 security association, you don't know what
it's trusted for.  You can only grant trust based on secure
identification of the remote party, which is a <root CA,certificate>
pair.  Suppose I want to talk secure SIGTRAN to you over IPsec, and
you're willing to permit this.  We then negotiate a Phase 1 SA.  I now
use that Phase 1 to negotiate a Phase 2 SA that specifies UDP port 161.
You don't know at this point that the Phase 1 SA was only for SIGTRAN.
Oops.


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
		http://www.wilyhacker.com (2nd edition of "Firewalls" book)