Subject: WG Review: Policy Framework (policy)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 1998 07:51:29 -0400

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the General Area.
The IESG has not made any determination as yet.

The following Description was submitted, and is provided for
informational purposes:

Problem Statement:

There is a need to represent, manage, and share policies and policy 
information in a vendor-independent, interoperable, scalable manner. The 
goal of this working group is to provide a framework that will meet 
these needs, along with specific schemata using that framework. These 
schemata will be used specifically for QoS traffic management. A 
secondary goal of this framework is to show that this general 
development process can be extended to other application domains.

Objectives:

The objectives of this working group are to:

1. Define a secure framework for policy definition and administration
   for a heterogeneous set of Policy Enforcement Points. The framework
   will be shown to be able to represent and manage policy information
   in an unambiguous, interoperable manner in a single administrative
   domain. It is assumed that this domain is controlled by a single
   Policy Server which uses a directory, accessed by LDAP. Care will be
   taken to ensure that this work is extensible to other types of
   repositories, such as relational databases.

2. Define a common Policy Definition Language (PDL) for translating
   from a business-specification, such as those found in a Service Level
   Agreement, to a set of policies specified in a common 
   vendor-independent intermediate form. This enables policy information
   to be shared among different vendors' Policy Servers.

3. The framework and PDL will first concentrate on provisioned and
   signaled QoS. Both will then be extended to consider other needs.

4. Once the framework and PDL are defined, schema work can be started.
   This will be an iterative process, and it is possible that once 
   specific schemata are designed, the PDL and/or the framework will be 
   revised.

The first schemata will be for that of QOS administration. This working 
group will work with the DiffServ, IntServ, RAP, and ISSLL working 
groups to develop schemata for both IPv4 and IPv6 for standards track 
work. To ensure that security issues are addressed, Russ Mundy will
serve as this working group's security adviser.

5. The charter specifically excludes:

  -protocol definition
  -schema attributes or classes that are vendor-specific (although the
   schema defined in this group will be defined in a way that is
   extensible by specific vendors)

6. There are many areas for future work. One is extending the framework
   to include exchange and management of policy data between 
   heterogeneous policy domains. However, this work is NOT part of this 
   existing Charter.