I have reviewed this document as part of the security directorate's
ongoing effort to review all IETF documents being processed by the IESG.
These comments were written primarily for the benefit of the security
area directors.  Document editors and WG chairs should treat these
comments just like any other last call comments.



This document adds a "referral" mechanism to Kerberos, where a client 


(e.g. an end user) can use a generic enterprise-wide name, and have it 


mapped to one that is specific to its correct realm; similarly, a 


generic name can be used for a service, and the KDC will respond with 


the correct principal name (and realm) for the service.




Summary



It is obvious that the analysis in the document's Security 


Considerations is very thorough. Unfortunately I do not have the 


Kerberos expertise (which apparently requires knowledge of specific 


implementations' quirky behavior) to determine if all relevant cases 


were covered.






A cursory reading of the Considerations is quite discouraging: several 


security mechanisms exist but they are not universally applied, some 


implementations do not even follow the base protocol etc. I can only 


hope that modern Kerberos implementations have improved in the 11 years 


since this protocol first got started.




Details



- Sec. 4: "trusted name service" is not well defined. In fact it can be 


construed as a euphemism for "enterprise-internal DNS", which is advised 


against earlier.


- 4.1, last paragraph: is there no possibility to an "issuing realm" to 


"publish" ownership of some resources to the consuming realm, and thus 


effectively claim those resources?



- 6. In the authorization ASN.1 snippet, what is the value of MAX?


- 7, first paragraph: when the client sends the request to example.com, 


shouldn't it ensure first that it has a pre-existing (pre-configured) 


trust relationship with example.com?


- 10: the last paragraph ("Accordingly") is a bit too vague and probably 


does not provide implementors with sufficient advice.


- 10: overall it is not clear if this section also applies to caching of 


client referrals.


- 11: surprise! FAST (which was an optional SHOULD in Sec. 6) is now a 


MUST! Even if it's just FAST negotiation that's a MUST, but FAST itself 


(or an equivalent) is just a SHOULD, this still doesn't make a lot of 


sense, and should at least be explained.


- 11: this section defines a new structure, but only explains a few of 


its members. Please mention where all the other members are defined (RFC 


4120?). By the way, key-expiration is said to be deprecated in RFC 4120, 


but what do I know.


- General: the document is said to update RFC 4120. A short section with 


a summary of the specific updates would be very useful, so that 


implementors can find out if they need to change anything, even if they 


do NOT support the Referral functionality. (This is really a shortcoming 


of the IETF notion of "RFC X updates RFC Y.")


- Appendix A: in "current implementation", do you mean post-Win 2003? 


Please clarify.


- Appendix A: a reference to the MS documentation might be appropriate: 


http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc233855

(v=prot.13).aspx




Thanks,
     Yaron