Nothing to See Here: FWNA Working Group Meeting

I attended the FWNA working group meeting this morning. We talked about a lot of things, but I wanted to provide links to two supplicants working towards our goals and using some information from us:

We were also talking about the charter of SALSA-NetAuth and SALSA-FWNA.

The Salsa-NetAuth Working Group Charter

The Salsa-NetAuth Working Group will consider the data requirements, implementation, integration, and automation technologies associated with understanding and extending network security management related to:

Authorized network access (keyed by person and/or system)

Style and behavior of transit traffic (declarative and passive)

Forensic support for investigation of abuse

Initial activities will include:

Investigation of requirements and implementations of network database and registration services in support of network security management

Investigation of extensions to these services including: proactive detection of unauthorized or malicious network activity; containment and prevention of such activity; identification and remediation of the sources of such activity

Analysis and proposal toward a pilot and eventual implementation to support network access to visiting scientists among federated institutions

Analysis of security applications that may result from extending these implementations

The Salsa-NetAuth Working Group Charter

The Salsa-NetAuth Working Group is chartered to address what is referred to as the ‘visiting scholar’ problem. From the Salsa-NetAuth charter:

Initial activities will include:

Analysis and proposal toward a pilot and eventual implementation to support network access to visiting scholars among federated institutions

Salsa-FWNA was formed as a sub-group of Salsa-NetAuth to address the substantial technical details of deploying a pilot federated wireless network authentication system. Initial work is focused on the project plan for the activity, developing engineering plans, and initial work on the pilot deployment.

We talked about how we might leverage the results of our visitor access survey and how we might be able to use the results to form a taxonomy that would help us define the problem space that FWNA should be trying to solve. It sounds like we decided it would make sense to go forward with a paper analysis of the results after the presentation this afternoon. Once the taxonomy was developed it would serve as a baseline to identify the problem space. It should then be possible to identify the solution spaces that are not adequately addressed — which should clarify our goals — and should help us speak to the community so they understand where FWNA fits into a layered approach to network authentication.

We talked about combining the 802.1X presentation that Kevin and Rich gave at the the last Internet2 Member Meeting with the one that Philippe and I are giving today. Also, we talked about identifying a bullet list of our issues with 802.1X adoption, like revocation and IP tracking.

Labels: fwna