Re: report from the alias BOF

[Sally Floyd <floyd@icir.org>]

>Unfortunately I missed the start and Bernard's talk, but my impression
>was that this was a relatively content-free BOF (as least as far as
>making progress is concerned).  Kevin had some more specific proposals
>on his slides, but he presented them as only being examples, and
>rather distanced himself from the specifics.  I'm still very unclear
>that the group has any consensus on a concrete plan.
 
The alias mailing list this week had the following discussion:
(from "http://mailman.berkeley.intel-research.net/mailman/listinfo/alias";,
this one from Alex Rousskov)

  The charter identifies two distinct investigation scopes:
  
  	1) transport intermediaries signaling to endpoints their
  	   existence and information
  
  	2) intermediaries and endpoints communicating in a secure
  	   manner and establishing security associations
  
  I am probably missing something important, but it seems to me that the
  first scope has virtually nothing to do with the second.
...
  If it is, why form a single WG to address two very different problems?

The answering email on the mailing list
("http://mailman.berkeley.intel-research.net/pipermail/alias/2003-November/000051.html";, from Hui-Lan Lu) was that there are two separate bullets on the
charter for the two separate pieces of work.  This seems ok to me.


The second bullet on the proposed charter is the following:

  + Intermediaries and endpoints to communicate in a secure manner and to
  establish security associations

(As the mailing list clarified, "intermediaries" should be corrected
to be "transport intermediaries".)

In my reading, the second bullet in the proposed charter is not
necessarily the same as the proposal by Thomas Woo at the BOF of
a *generic* protocol for this purpose for use for communication
with a range of different transport intermediaries.  Going by the
charter, I think it should be an open question whether this second
bullet should be met by a generic protocol, or by other approaches.
(I am personally a little apprehensive about a generic approach
that would be completely agnostic about the nature of the transport
intermediary under consideration.)


I agree with you that the BOF itself did not have much by way of
new content.

- Sally