eap Mailing List: RE: Re: comments on draft-groeting-eap-netselection-results -00.txt

[Tschofenig Hannes (hannes.tschofenig]

hi bernard, 

i fully agree with you. 
the ssid is unstructured and the bssid has no meaning to the user. 
the introduction of the NAIRealms as an identifier is certainly useful.

ciao
hannes


> > since these identifiers are used for a few things (such as 
> > identification, authentication and authorization) you might want to 
> > have a more convient identifier which means something to an 
> end user. 
> > otherwise you could just use the hash of a public key and 
> truncate it 
> > to 48 bits. such an identifier would look ugly (for a user) 
> but would have some security properties.
> 
> The problem with hashes is that at some point the user may 
> want to know what they are connected to.  We've already 
> concluded that the SSID can be confusing;  does "linksys" 
> mean you are at home, or in a cafe within reach of a small 
> business that also purchased an AP from the same vendor?
> Displaying a hash to the user probably wouldn't help the 
> user, even though it might be quite useful to the machine.
> 
> That is I think one of the motivations behind the use of 
> NAIRealms as identifiers.  Because they are FQDNS, the 
> registration is handled by IANA and so some level of 
> uniqueness is provided.
>