Re: IANA document

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 12:43:53PM -0500, Michael Richardson wrote:
>   Uh, "Expert Review" is a looser policy than "Specification Required"
> 
>   Expert Review means you email IANA, and say:
> 
> 	 "please allocate me an IKEv2 integrity algorithm transform number
>           for TripleRot-13"
> 
>   IANA, then forwards to "Expert", and "Expert" says,
> 
> 	"Yeah, that sounds reasonable, go ahead"
> 
> or:	"Wait, TripleRot-13 is a cipher, I think that this request is
> 	unfounded"     
> 
>   That's all.

My understanding was that an Expert represented a much higher bar,
because human is in the loop.  My assumption was that an Expert would
require a specification, and then apply human judgement about whether
or not a particular assignment was warranted.  Depending on the
expert, the standards set can be quite high.

>   Specification Required means that there has to be a document somewhere.
> I thought this meant RFC series of some kind, but I've been told that for
> ciphers, a publication in a peer-reviewed journal would do. That's a lot 
> harder than just sending an email.

Actually, anything permanent will qualify.  So any crackpot idea in a
graduate student's thesis, or a Technical Report published by a lab
might be enough to get a number assigned.  For a space with over
32,000 available values, that hopefully won't be an issue.  But for a
registry space where there are only 122 free slots, suppose someone
publishes a single paper that consumes half a dozen or more payload
id's.  Presumably that would be a case where an human expert would
hopefully say, hey now, wait a moment!

						- Ted