Subject: Unresolved issues with RPL-11: security section.

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 14:12:51 -0400

I have read the security sections of draft-ietf-roll-rpl-11.
The encumbered signature algorithms have been removed, which is good.

There are two major issues which I thought were brought up in RPL-10
which are still unresolved:

  1) if RPL is using a link-level security mechanism, how can 
     the distinction in section 3.3.3 (and 10.1) between "pre-installed"
     and "authenticated" be communicated from the link-level
     security to the RPL-level?
     I.e. how is layer-2/layer-3 channel binding done?

     (When the security is built-in, then section 10.2 tries to explain
      it, and I think the idea will work, but I'm not sure if the actual
      details are right.

      The rules of 10.2 will take me some time to fully understand,
      and they are very new.)
 
  2) we still do not know how to calculate the MAC.
     What byte does it start at?  The beginning of the IPv6 header,
     it says in 10.8.  What values go into the mutable fields?  What
     about checksum? Flow-Label?  I'd guess zero, but???

     I'd like to see a sample packet in the document along with the
     keys involved.

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