[Cryptography] asymmetric attacks on crypto-protocols - the rough consensus attack

[Stephen Farrell]

Hiya,

On 03/08/15 22:33, Jerry Leichter wrote:
> 2.  There's a (pre-determined) cutoff time after which no new proposals can be entered.

That could work in some place but not in the IETF. (Although there are
timers and cutoffs involved in the nominal IETF process.)

In the IETF we have a theory, which is actually fairly well reflected
by practice, that any decision can be overturned by a sufficiently
compelling new fact. That has not infrequently resulted in work being
sent back to working groups at IETF last call time when a different
set of folks not involved in the working group get to describe their
views of the downsides of some thing or other.

I think overall the benefit of being fact-based regardless of how much
it buggers up progress is more significant than the potential for fixed
timings such as you've suggested to mitigate an action taken as part of
an invisible bullrun attack. (Once again, I assert that we need to not
try consider bullrun in isolation, but we need to try our best to
counter all methods of gaming the system without worrying about the
unkonwable details as to why someone may be gaming the system.)

That said, I do agree that there's usually a giant debate about what
are in fact the facts in most such situations, so YMMV in terms of
what reasonable folks can conclude on this point.

S.