Subject: Protocol Action: 'Data Types in the Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service Protocol (RADIUS)' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-radext-datatypes-08.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2016 21:15:30 -0800

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Data Types in the Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service Protocol
   (RADIUS)'
  (draft-ietf-radext-datatypes-08.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the RADIUS EXTensions Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Benoit Claise, Kathleen Moriarty and Joel
Jaeggli.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-radext-datatypes/

Technical Summary

RADIUS specifications have used data types for two decades without
defining them as managed entities.  During this time, RADIUS
implementations have named the data types, and have used them in
attribute definitions.  This document updates the specifications to
better follow established practice.  We do this by naming the data
types defined in RFC 6158, which have been used since at least RFC
2865.  We provide an IANA registry for the data types, and update the
RADIUS Attribute Type registry to include a "Data Type" field for
each attribute.  Finally, we recommend that authors of RADIUS
specifications use these types in preference to existing practice.

Working Group Summary

This document has received many iterations of review by almost all
active participants. There is a broad consensus that this type of
document is needed. A number of specifications in the queue are
waiting for this RFC to exist so that they have a stable point of
reference.

Document Quality

The document has overall gotten sufficient review. One small area
of concern for the Shepherd is the long list of attributes and their
retrofitted datatypes in section 4.2: this was a signficant amount
of legwork for the author, and this kind of work is prone to errors.
Even though the working group reviewed the document as such, it
can't be expected that all of them did the cross-reference legwork
to look up all attributes and their datatypes in the original RFCs.
Nevertheless, the document is ready for the publication process:
IETF Last Call should motivate the community at large to at least
check the attributes of concern for them and find corresponding
errors if any.

Personnel

The Document Shepherd is Stefan Winter.
The responsible Area Director is Kathleen Moriarty.

IANA Note

This draft establishes a new RADIUS registry that requires IETF review to add entries.  This draft also updates the RADIUS Attribute Type Registry.