Subject: [eap] "MIC"

From: [email-masked] (Henrik Levkowetz)
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2003 00:48:52 +0100

The following may be a general language issue with 2284bis, but I'm not sure,
so I'll pose it as a question with a lead-in:

Prompted by Bernard proposal of an Appendix section on Message Integrity
Checks, and remembering Yoshihiro's reference to what RFC 2828 recommends
with respect to this term (don't use it), I did a search through existing 
RFCs, and found that:

  	"MIC" is used in 34 rfcs. The context is:

	email or MIME	22 counts
	GSS-API		 6 counts
	generic		 1 count
	FTP		 1 count
	PGP		 1 count
	FDDI		 1 count

The term is not used in RFC 2716 (PPP EAP TLS), and not in RFC 2246 (TLS).

"..message integrity check.." occurs once in 2246, but it is not used as
an established concept, exactly: "Message transport includes a message
integrity check using a keyed MAC."

So here is the question: 

Is the term MIC in broad use today when talking about integrity protecting
checksums for EAP methods, so that it's use in 2284bis is simply a reflection
of current practice; or is it just an expression which happened to be used
at some early point in the life of 2284bis, and has been carried along 
without a great deal of deliberation?

	Henrik