Subject: WG Review: Kitten (kitten)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 14:30:37 -0400

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Security 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 ([email-masked]) by October 27th.

Kitten (kitten)
================

Current Status: Proposed Working Group

Description:

The Generic Security Services API [RFC 2743, RFC 2744] provides an API
for applications to set up security contexts and to use these contexts
for per-message protection services. The Common Authentication Technology
Next Generation Working Group (Kitten) will work on standardizing
extensions and improvements to the core GSSAPI specification and language
bindings that the IETF believes are necessary based on experience using
GSSAPI over the last 10 years. Extensions may be published as separate
drafts or included in a GSSAPI version 3. While version 2 of the GSSAPI
may be clarified, no backward incompatible changes will be made to this
version of the API.

This working group is chartered to revise the GSSAPI v2 RFCs for the
purpose of clarifying areas of ambiguity:
o Use of channel bindings
o Thread safety restrictions
o C language utilization clarifications and recommendations
(e.g., type utilization, name spaces)
o Guidelines for GSS-API mechanism designers
o Guidelines for GSS-API application protocol designers

This working group is chartered to specify a non-backward compatible
GSSAPI v3 including support for the following extensions:
o Clarify the portable use of channel bindings and better specify
channel bindings in a language-independent manner.
o Specify thread safety extensions to allow multi-threaded applications
to use GSSAPI
o Definitions of channel bindings for TLS, IPSec, SSH and other
cryptographic channels based on work started in the NFSV4 working
group.
o Define a GSSAPI extension to allow applications to store credentials.
Discussions to be started based upon:
o draft-williams-gss-store-deleg-creds-xx.txt
o Extensions to solve problems posed by the Global Grid Forum's GSSAPI
extensions document.
o Extensions to deal with mechanism-specific extensibility in a
multi-mechanism environment.
o Extend the GSS-API to support authorization by portable GSS
applications while also supporting mechanisms that do not have a
single canonical name for each authentication identity.
o Specify a Domain-based GSS service principal name consisting of:
service name, host name, and domain name for use by application
services hosted across multiple servers.
o Extensions to support stackable GSSAPI mechanisms.
o Define a Psuedo-Random Function for GSSAPI

This working group is chartered to perform the following GSSAPI mechanism
specification work:

o Specify a GSSAPI v2/v3 Channel Conjunction Mechanism
o Revise RFC 2748 (SPNEGO) to correct problems that make the
specification unimplementable and to document the problems
found in widely-deployed attempts to implement this spec.
o Update the GSSAPI Java Language Bindings to match actual implementation

This working group is chartered to perform the following new GSSAPI Language
Binding specification work:

o Specify a language binding for C#

End of Proposed Charter

The participants of the IETF-CAT mailing list realize the quantity of
work which we desire to undertake is quite ambitious in scope. This is
simply an indication of how much work has accumulated over the last few
years since the CAT working group disbanded. We believe that we can
accomplish the stated work items in 18 months.

MAILING LIST:
The mailing list for discussions is

[email-masked]

Use the following web page to join:

https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/kitten

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