Access Link Intermediaries Assisting Services BOF (alias) Tuesday, November 11 at 1415-1515 ================================= CHAIRS: Kevin Fall (kfall@eecs.berkeley.edu) Hui-Lan Lu (huilanlu@lucent.com) AGENDA: + Agenda bashing, all + Discussion of charter, all + Survey of transport intermediaries, TBD + Wrapping up MAILING LIST: alias@mailman.berkeley.intel-research.net TO JOIN: http://mailman.berkeley.intel-research.net/mailman/listinfo/alias PROPOSED CHARTER: Several types of physical links increasingly used for Internet connectivity today possess undesirable characteristics, such as high loss, high delay, and low reliability. Dial-up telephone lines and radio links in wireless networks (e.g., 3G, GPRS, GSM, IS-95, IEEE 802.11 and satellite) are examples of such links, whose presence results in degradation in performance of Internet protocols and services. Transport intermediaries have been used to mitigate performance degradation caused by problematic links (see RFC 3135). Such intermediaries typically reside in nodes (e.g., base stations, or access points) located at the ends of problematic links. Up to this point, however, there has been no systematic investigation of the security implications of the use of transport intermediaries, performance enhancing or not, and of a common framework for secure transport intermediary services. The alias working group will fill this void by first investigating the requirements for standard means for + Transport intermediaries to signal to endpoints their existence and information (e.g., knowledge of changing link conditions) pertaining to their services or to usefully influencing the endpoint operation + Intermediaries and endpoints to communicate in a secure manner and to establish security associations If this investigation yields useful requirements that point towards a feasible solution, the working group will then develop the common framework and the standard means. While conducting its work, the working group will take into consideration the related work in other active working groups, including pilc, ipsec, midcom, opes, nsis and send. The deliverables of the working group within its first 9 months of existence will include Informational RFCs that present + Survey of the current state-of-the-art in transport intermediaries and use cases with the focus on how they interact with endpoints and their security properties, including conditions where endpoint-intermediary security association is required and whether an endpoint or intermediary initiates a particular service + Characteristics of secure transport intermediary services that are performed with explicit knowledge and optional consent of endpoints and may involve negotiation and security association between the endpoint and intermediary + Requirements for securely enabling the in-scope transport-intermediary services while minimizing their impacts on end-to-end security + Analysis of signaling information (e.g., link conditions) of which explicit knowledge by endpoints or intermediaries is useful READING: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-blumenthal-intermediary-transport-00.txthttp://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-dawkins-trigtran-linkup-00.txt http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-dawkins-trigtran-framework-00.txt http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-dawkins-trigtran-probstmt-01.txt