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IEEE P1619 minutes from Feb. 26 2004 meeting



Title: Message
Minutes from IEEE P1619 meeting, Thursday Feb. 26 2004.
Meeting Location: Milpitas, CA. Some attendees used phone linkup.
Minutes were taken by Jim Hughes and Clement Kent
 
Present:
Jim Hughes, STK (JH)
Shai Halevi, IBM   (SH)
Bob Nixon, Emulex (BN)
Steve Sletten, Sun (SS)
Clement Kent, Kasten Chase (CK)
Serge Plotkin, Decru (SP)
Fabio Maino, Andiamo/Cisco (FM)
Dalit Naor, IBM (on Phone) (DN)
Kumar from Neoscale (on phone) (K)
Jim Williams, Emulex (on phone) (JW)
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The IEEE Patent presentation was read. No questions were raised.
 
Minutes from the previous meeting were read. Motion to accept minutes made by Jim Hughes, seconded by Fabio Maino, approved by acclamation.
 
Jim reminded the group of voting and membership rules as follows:
Membership is open to anyone after attending 2 consecutive meetings in the last year, including the current meeting. For the purpose of counting the two meetings, a company is considered in attendance if either its primary or secondary representative is participating in the meeting, either in person or by phone. Jim is keeping a spreadsheet of attendance to establish who current voting members are.

Voting -

- quorum of votes cast.

- Electronic votes are permitted, reduced to paper, and a full quorum must participate. Quorum is >50% of voting members. One vote per company.

- Straw polls are informal. All in attendance.

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Action Items:
 
Actions brought forward from last meeting:
- overview document reassigned from JH to CK
- Wide block - SH - closed
- sample code for wide block - SH - open
- r=1 reassigned to CK, under revision
- key backup - closed
- OSD encryption still open.
 
New actions:
- JH - post past minutes to web
- SH - bring forward intro& motivations section, to be copied into other documents
- Next Meeting date: Friday April 16 10-5, in College Park Maryland to accompany the NASA/IEEE mass storage conference (see http://storageconference.org/2004/). This info to be published on http://www.siswg.org/ by JH
- a number of other in-progress document editing steps or reports to other groups are described in the detailed minutes below.
 
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Discussion:
 
 
EME document:
 
This was presented by SH. Document is on reflector.
 
Note that a number of the comments were agreed to apply to all other documents, so same changes should be made to them.
- change to address usage only for storage, not a general algorithm. Use phrase "data at rest encryption"
- storage to cover object store - not be too specific
- specify the tweak as the serial number of the blob. "Blob" is our current working name for the unit of storage encryption, previously called "sector". We are still looking for a name which has implications of a fixed length storage object, rather than the general variable length objects understood by database people to be "blobs". SS liked "glob". SH suggests "wide block" (or wblock for short).
- add something to the document about the bad idea of using the same key and same tweak in more than one location
- For tape, objects (in the sense of OSD) or 520 byte or other sector (aka blob) sizes it is expected that these are out of scope for this document.
- CK raised question of adding padding words for ragged chunks of data - agreed to defer this to possible other document, and Dalit and Julian Satran may address it
for ObjectStorage.
- Question raised regarding tape vs disk. Suggested may have separate recommendation for encryption modes for tape involving extra integrity bytes. JH says lets avoid SHA for these, in favor of simplicity of methods using AES such as AES-hash (or Whirlpool???)
-  Shai asked to limit EME-32-AES scope to 512 byte strings.
- T10 is doing 16 bit CRC. SCSI can do 520 bytes. See T10 SBC-2 (http://www.t10.org/ftp/t10/document.03/03-176r0.pdf) 8 bytes from 512 up are 2 bytes
CRC, 2 bytes app tag, 4 bytes block number. Can't be re-used for tape integrity.
- Shai's doc doesn't specify tweak, other doc requ'd for tweak spec. Discussion of correct place to put tweak. Serge suggests putting tweak generation procedures
in Shai's document along with identifiers for these.
 
Key Backup document:
 
This was presented by DN.
 
- "key escrow" and "key recovery" were rejected in favor of "key backup"
- much discussion of meaning of fields - details not all recorded here. DN will issue revised draft with changes as discussed. One main thread in discussion was to have unique identifiers for cipher modes which include version numbers. A cipher mode identifier will uniquely identify key strength (128, 256, etc), r mode (EME-32, LRW-1), and tweak method. SP emphasized need to easily separate out version numbers.
- noted that ultimate key backup representation will be XML, therefore field sizes in this document refer to upper limits of length of values, not actual representation lengths in XML
- Discussed that LBA_START overloads two meanings: where the data encoded by this algorithm starts, and what origin value the tweak function begins with. SP mentioned some reasons why the separation of meaning is important.
- SP mentions possible need for a field identifying the storage to which the key applies. Much discussion. Agreement for now to use "COMMENT" field if desired for this.
- Discussion re need to standardize XML standard used. CK will send email to Dalit cc all pointing to a specific IETF standard. He will propose specific methods and 
wrap/unwrapped options.
- CK notes that exporting unwrapped keys may violate vendor product FIPS certifications, therefore mandating unwrapped keys in backup could cause problems
 
LRW-1 document
 
This was presented by CK.
- CK and Cyril Guyot will revise [TWEAK] to acknowledge the committee, details of names to be added later.
- Change codes in document references to form TWEAK03, LRW02, etc (suffix year).
- Change sector to blob, key recovery to key backup.
- Sponsor shd be IEEE Standards rather than SISWG.
- CK: will revise LRW-AES paper with wording changes and recirculate before next meeting.
 
Scramble:
 
- Proposer was not present to discuss "Scramble" paper. He may reintroduce it to a future meeting's agenda.
 
 
Other items:
- BN raises question of whether movement of data by snapshot replication equipment which does not respect logical sector/cipherblock offsets will make data unreadable due to tweaking. Answer from several: yes, by design. Example: Veritas volume mgr will attempt to backup by sectors in a way that will not be readable.
 
- CK raises question of which other groups need to be aware of our status. T10, TCG are suggested. Next TCG face to face is Mar 31, Apr 1-2 San Diego. Weekly con-calls. Shai will talk to IBM TCG people. Bob Nixon will offer T10 a presentation. Steve Sletten will inform TCG of what we are doing, and offer the opportunity for a more detailed follow-up.
 
- Encourage e-mail correspondence to shorten April meeting. Goal: schedule phone call 2 weeks before April meeting to resolve items early, with hope of having final drafts approved at April meeting.