Subject: RFC 4270 Errata

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2005 10:30:30 +0100

Hi,

    I just started reading the recently announced RFC 4270, and bounced
a bit when reading section 1, paragraph 3.  There are changes in this
paragraph, when compared to draft-hoffman-hash-attacks-04, which to my
mind are quite unfortunate:

The RFC says:
   Hash algorithms are used by cryptographers in a variety of security
   protocols, for a variety of purposes, at all levels of the Internet
   protocol stack.  They are used because they have two security
   properties: to be one way and collision free.

Note the " one way and collision free."  On the face of it, as plain
English, this is nonsense.  In cryptographic terminology, I believe 
the correct expression is " one-way and collision-free."  

The draft says:
   Hash algorithms are used by cryptographers in a variety of security
   protocols, for a variety of purposes, at all levels of the Internet
   protocol stack.  They are used because they have two security
   properties: to be one-way and collision-free.

I'd like an errata to be posted, correcting this back to the text in
the draft.

One of these errors re-occurs in paragraph 7 of section 2, and also
should be corrected:

RFC:
   Attacks against the "one way" property:

Should be:
   Attacks against the "one-way" property:

Regards,

	Henrik

---

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2005 11:00:47 +0100

Hi again,

  The following quote from my previous message was erroneous - I'd
mixed up the two documents in this case.  The RFC uses "one-way" and
the draft (inconsistently) "one way".  Please disregard this part.

Regards,

	Henrik