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