Subject: Protocol Action: 'PA-TNC: A Posture Attribute Protocol (PA) Compatible with TNC' to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2009 20:38:33 -0800 (PST)

The IESG has approved the following document:

- 'PA-TNC: A Posture Attribute Protocol (PA) Compatible with TNC '
   <draft-ietf-nea-pa-tnc-06.txt> as a Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Network Endpoint Assessment Working Group. 

The IESG contact persons are Tim Polk and Pasi Eronen.

A URL of this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-nea-pa-tnc-06.txt

Technical Summary 

This document defines the PA-TNC protocol. PA-TNC is a Posture 
Attribute protocol that carries posture attributes between a 
Posture Collector on a NEA client and a Posture Validator on a NEA 
server. The PA-TNC protocol is designed to run over the PB-TNC 
protocol. PA-TNC is equivalent to the Trusted Computing 
Group's IF-M 1.0 protocol. It addresses the PA protocol requirements 
defined in the NEA requirements specification.

Working Group Summary 

The WG solicited proposals for the PA protocol based on the 
NEA reference model and requirements specified in RFC 5209. The TCG 
submitted a specification to the NEA WG in response to the call for 
proposals. There was broad support in the WG to adopt the submission as 
a WG document. Subsequent WG updates to the document have not been 
contentious.

The protocol document specifies a base protocol and is extensible. 
The WG has discussed the potential for certain optimizations and 
extensions to the above specifications (e.g. additional standard 
posture attributes). The proposed extensions did not share the same 
level of consensus as the base document and represented significant 
additional work. The WG decided to defer potential extensions to 
supplemental documents in the interests of making progress on the base 
documents.

Document Quality  

Several vendors have indicated their intention in public or private to 
implement the specification.

Personnel

Susan Thomson is the document shepherd. Tim Polk is the responsible 
Area Director.