A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Transport Area. The IESG has not made any determination as yet. The following description was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send your comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg@ietf.org) by February 18th. Link-Enhancing Transport Intermediary Communication (letic) ----------------------------------------------------- Current Status: Proposed Working Group Description of Working Group: Several types of physical links increasingly used for Internet connectivity today possess undesirable characteristics, such as high loss, high delay, and low reliability (including short-term intermittent availability). Radio links in wireless networks (e.g., GPRS or CDMA 2000) are examples of such links. The presence of one of more of these types of links anywhere in an end-to-end path can result in performance degradation of several Internet protocols and services, although many of these links frequently appear as 'access links' (the link closest to the client endpoint). 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 (although this is not a requirement -- our intended scope is for any links, edge or otherwise). Somewhat more formally, a transport intermediary may be defined as follows: An IP-addressable entity, conceived to be along the path of two endpoints interacting (via IP unicast) that inspects and/or modifies traffic passing through it up to and possibly including the transport layer (but not performing so-called "data" transformations) To date, there has been no systematic investigation of existing mechanisms to request, discover, control, and obtain information from such intermediaries, and there is no solid guidance for designing such mechanisms for future intermediaries. In particular, there is no common understanding of the security requirements for such mechanisms. The working group will fill this void by first investigating the existing state-of-the-art and then formulating requirements for standard mechanisms to allow: + Transport intermediaries to signal to endpoints (or vice-versa) their existence, their capabilities, desires, or other useful information (e.g., knowledge of changing link conditions) + Intermediaries and endpoints to communicate in a secure manner and to establish security associations if required Assuming the formulation is successful (i.e., it 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 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 1. A survey of existing and planned/desired transport intermediaries and how they interact with endpoints. Specific attention is to be paid to the discovery process, security needs, and maintenance of state (e.g., if endpoints and intermediaries expect to remain in contact with each other). In addition, for those systems providing dynamic information about the network (e.g., link conditions) to endpoints, a list of what information is conveyed by the intermediary and how it is used by an endpoint will be included. 2. A determination of which services the WG will focus on (termed "in-scope transport intermediary services") and to what extent these particular services require secure interactions that might impact end-to-end security. 3. The requirements of a (future) secure transport intermediary protocol based on the findings of #2. Such a protocol may support, for example, explicit knowledge of and optional consent from endpoints that may involve negotiation and security association establishment between an endpoint and intermediary.
