[Chapter-delegates] IETF 78 Rough Guide Follow-up

[Greg Wood]

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Follow-up to the Internet Society's Rough Guide to IETF 78's Hot Topics 
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In July, we published the Rough Guide to IETF 78's Hot Topics. Here now is the follow up to the meetings highlighted in that guide.

For IETF 78, which was held in Maastricht, Netherlands, we focused our attention on working groups, BoFs, plenaries, and other events in the following broad categories:

	* Common and Open Internet
	* Global Addressing
	* Security and Stability
	* Trust and IDentity

In addition to the main IETF content, the Internet Society (ISOC) also held another expert panel "DNS: Secure at 27, what's next?" that gathered experts to discuss the increasing interest in the Domain Name System (DNS), sparked in part by growing momentum behind deployment of the IETF-developed DNSSEC standard. You can listen to a recording of that event here:

http://www.isoc.org/isoc/conferences/maastricht-dns/

Looking ahead, the final preparations are underway for IETF 79, in Beijing, China, 7-12 November 2010, so we will soon be bringing you a guide to the expected highlights of that meeting.

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Common and Open Internet
As P2P and VoIP technologies become more prevalent, and network usage patterns sometimes deviate from their architects' expectations, managing bandwidth to allow best use for customers becomes an increasingly important topic.
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conex WG (Congestion Exposure)

Congestion Exposure enables congestion to be exposed along the forwarding path of the Internet. By revealing expected congestion in the IP header of packets, congestion exposure provides a generic network capability which allows greater freedom over how capacity is shared. Such information could be used for many purposes, including congestion policing, accountability and inter-domain SLAs.

Outcomes:

o Conex WG continues to make progress towards the charter milestones.
o Early implementation reports indicate that the proposed protocol operates as expected.
o Much more work is needed to make it useful in the operational Internet however.

Minutes: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/78/minutes/conex.txt

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decade (Decoupled Application Data Enroute) BOF

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications, including both P2P streaming and P2P
file-sharing applications, make up a large fraction of traffic in
the Internet today. One way to reduce access network and/or cross-domain
bandwidth usage by P2P applications is to introduce storage capabilities
in the network between hosts running P2P applications. Allowing P2P
applications to store and retrieve data from inside the network can
reduce traffic on the last-mile uplink, as well as backbone and
transit links.

Outcomes:

o The decade WG continues to make progress towards its chartered milestones.
o Requirements and Survey documents have been adopted as WG work items.

Minutes: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/78/minutes/decade.html

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homegate BoF (Broadband Home Gateway)

The basic hypothesis of this (proposed) working group is that a well organized collection of requirements for support of various features would make it more likely that future home gateway devices behave better in certain existing problematic situations.

Outcomes:
o There is ongoing disagreement about the appropriate scope for this work.
o Since the IETF78 meeting, the effort to form a WG in this area has been abandoned in favour of interested parties submitting individual drafts, with the tag '-homenet-' in the filename.
o The need for a WG will be reconsidered at a later time.

Minutes: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/78/minutes/homegate.pdf

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Global Addressing
There is steadily increasing momentum to deploy IPv6 as the IPv4 address pool approaches depletion. While much work is ongoing to support interoperability in coexisting IPv4 and IPv6 network environments, there are also interesting developments in emerging IPv6 environments.
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intarea WG (Internet Area)

The Internet Area Working Group acts primarily as a forum
for discussing far-ranging topics that affect the entire area. Such
topics include, for instance, address space issues, basic IP layer
functionality, and architectural questions. The group also serves as a
forum to distribute information about ongoing activities in the area,
create a shared understanding of the challenges and goals for the area,
and to enable coordination.

Outcomes:
o 'Issues with IP Address Sharing' draft to be advanced to WG Last Call

Minutes: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/78/minutes/intarea.txt


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Security and Stability
Securing the DNS and greater assurance in routing is critical for the ongoing expansion and evolution of the Internet in all areas of our societies and economies.
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karp (Keying and Authentication for Routing Protocols) WG

Many routing protocol deployments, if they use authentication at all, are using older (possibly deprecated) cryptographic algorithms and are missing some modern security mechanisms, like replay protection, algorithm agility, or key rollover. In addition, the issue of key management is a major stumbling block to deployment. The karp working group was recently chartered to address these issues and held its second working group meeting at IETF78. The three foundational documents, intended to guide the efforts of the working group, were reviewed in detail. Consensus on these documents will be needed before individual protocols can be addressed. 

Full charter: http://tools.ietf.org/wg/karp/charters

Outcomes:
- Incremental progress on the foundational documents.  
- Recognition of the need to increase input from the operator community to help identify barriers to deployment.

Meeting minutes are available at: 
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/78/minutes/karp.html

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sidr (Secure Inter-Domain Routing) WG
The SIDR WG is focused on securing inter-domain routing. The approach being developed is Resource PKI (RPKI). RPKI adds an authentication framework to BGP. It is going to require a certificate management infrastructure, and models that accommodate infrastructure are on the agenda. Agenda topics for IETF78 included key rollover, removing TLS from the provisioning protocol, revisions to the Trust Anchor format, algorithm migration, and certification policies. The working group was reminded that the NRO has a deadline of 1 Jan 2011 to start operations with RPKI. It would be good to have the working group documents approved by that time. 

Outcomes
- Progress continued on a number of technical topics.
- An objective of having the working group document out of Last Call by Beijing was established. 

Minutes: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/78/minutes/sidr.txt


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Trust and Identity
As public concerns increase about security of infrastructure, privacy, trust, and identity on the Internet, these themes recur in several working group discussions.
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fedauth BOF

The Federated Authentication Beyond the Web BOF is striving to specify a federated identity mechanism for use by Internet Protocols not based on HTML/HTTP. This includes IMAP, XMPP, SSH, and NFS. "Federated identity facilitates the controlled sharing of information about principals, commonly across organisational boundaries." The primary purpose of this BOF was to establish the need for and maturity of a possible working group. The agenda included a description of use cases, an overview of the Moonshot proposal, and charter discussions. The general consensus of the room was support for the chartering of a new working group to address this topic. 

Outcomes:
- Expectation is that a working group will be formed as the result of this BOF.
- Continue charter discussions on the mailing list. 

Minutes: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/78/minutes/fedauth.txt


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