[Babel-users] [babel] rather than ripemd160...

[Toke Høiland-Jørgensen]

David Schinazi <dschinazi.ietf at gmail.com> writes:

>>
>>
>> Why not? If it's not MTI you risk the case where you get to pick between
>> "good performance on weak devices" and "interoperability with RFC-only
>> implementations".
>>
>
> Where are these "RFC-only implementations" of Babel?

Anyone who does a from-scratch implementation from the RFC, without
being part of the working group process, or looking at the existing
implementations.

> Remember the IETF does not have a protocol police, MTI is purely
> guidance. Implementors build what they (or their customers) need for
> their use-case. Implementors will add Blake if they need it, not based
> on whether it's MTI or not.

If it's MTI, they can't claim compliance with the RFC until it's in
there. So the "we need this box checked" type of product development
will benefit from this; and while sure, theoretically MTI is a hint,
it's a pretty strong one...

> Lastly, remember that this is a security solution, so you do NOT want
> to interoperate with a future theoretical implementation, because that
> will not have the keys. Adding any new node in the network will
> require a provisioning step, and that step ensures the new node
> supports the required features.

You can usually control the config, but not necessarily the features
implemented by the device...

-Toke