Summary of the TGi OUI Discussion
I'm going to attempt to summarise the discussion, and the open
questions.
It seems there are two major issues here.
(1) TGi's use of 0-0-0 as a special value to identify suite selectors
assigned by them in the standard itself. Leaving aside the rights and
wrongs of this, it is clear that there are individuals who feel very
strongly that this is the wrong thing to do and that it must be fixed.
(2) The use of a four byte cipher selector including a three byte OUI.
The opinion has been expressed that an EUI should be used instead. EUIs
(according to the tutorial) give a much larger "address space" for
company allocated values.
On the first issue, given the strength of feeling, does anyone actually
object to changing this value? And if no-one objects to that, does
anyone object to TGi simply asking the RAC to tell them which value to
use?
On the second issue, I think the (possibly unstated) concern is that use
of EUI-64 will significantly increase the length of the already
over-long 802.11 beacon. It's also arguable that the last thing we want
to do as a standards body is to encourage the use of huge numbers of
different (and incompatible) cipher suites. While we have to be
realistic and accept the need for vendor defined suites, we shouldn't
necessarily go out of our way to make it easy for them to be added.
What do people think?
Mike Moreton
Synad Technologies Ltd.