Methodology for Researching Security Considerations Sections
Alan Mills, Mark McFadden · 2020
RFC3552 provides guidance to authors in crafting RFC text on Security Considerations. The RFC is more than fifteen years old. With the threat landscape and security ecosystem significantly changed since the RFC was published, RFC3552 is a candidate for update. This draft proposes that, prior to drafting an update to RFC3553, an examination of recent, published Security Considerations sections be carried out as a baseline for how to improve RFC3553. It suggests a methodology for examining Security Considerations sections in published RFCs and the extraction of both quantitative and qualitative information that could inform a revision of the older guidance. It also reports on a recent experiment on textual analysis of sixteen years of RFC Security Consideration sections.