eap Mailing List: Issue 209: Applicability statement

[Bernard Aboba (aboba]

Issue 209: Applicability statement
Submitter name: Allison MankinSubmitter
Email address: mankin [at] psg.com
Date first submitted: 12/18/2003
Reference:
Document:  RFC 2284bis-07
Comment type: E
Priority: S
Section: 1.3
Rationale/Explanation of issue:

I think there are many virtues to this spec, but it needs more attention
to the applicability description. The problem is epitomized by comments such
as:

   Where transport efficiency is a consideration, and IP transport is
   available, it may be preferable to expose an artificially high EAP
   MTU to EAP and allow fragmentation to take place in IP.
   Alternatively, it is possible to choose other security mechanisms
   such as TLS [RFC2246] or IKE [RFC2409] or an alternative
   authentication framework such as SASL [RFC2222] or GSS-API [RFC2743].

How could the same application use GSS-API or SASL if it intended to use
EAP

They seem to have very different domains of applicability.  It would be
good to discuss the ways that EAP is very applicable and ways in which it can
be kind of wedged into use, with results that may be only just satisfactory.