*MACE Conference Call*
July 1, 2002

*Participants*

Bob Morgan -- Washington (chair)
Scott Cantor -- OSU
Renee Frost -- Michigan/Internet2
Michael Gettes -- Georgetown
Keith Hazelton -- Wisconsin
Paul Hill -- MIT
Jim Jokl -- Virginia
Ken Klingenstein -- Colorado/Internet2
Neal McBurnett -- Internet2
Ton Verschuren -- SURFnet
David Wasley -- UCOP
Nate Klingenstein -- Internet2 (scribe)

*Discussion*

- CAMP Agenda -

Base CAMP had a smaller attendance than would've been preferred, which was attributed largely to advertising glitches, but the attendees had a large volume of positive feedback to return. In fact, the scale of the meeting may have led to a more productive discussion, as well as a higher-than-expected degree of clue. A few developments from it will be reflected in the schedule and aim of the Advanced CAMP: there was a lot of desire for an operational directory conversation, as was there desire for an hour on the use of Shibboleth in the intra-realm case. This overlaps interestingly with WebISO. [AI] Keith offered to look back at the survey taken during the Internet2 Spring Member Meeting to determine whether any functions can arise out of that for Advanced CAMP. Bob was unable to return anything to Ken regarding more detailed discussion of an agenda for Advanced CAMP due to significant laptop issues. Ken has still listed the delegation problem as a major theme, broken down in the conference itself along the traditional lines of scenarios, requirements, alternatives, etc.

- Document Process Planning -

A long-time goal of MACE has been to develop a fixed process for documents developed by Internet2 working groups. This sort of document track would standardize the evaluation and adoption of drafts by the workgroups. A number of names were suggested as possible contributors to a discussion of how the track would be developed. Document lifecycle is another big issue in the same vein which affects current documents and could encompass linking between documents as well as the more traditional functionality. [AI] A call will be set up with the usual suspects to discuss next steps in development of a document process.

- WS-Security -

Foiled again by his laptop, Bob has been long preparing a note regarding WS-Security. Everything started with an odd announcement of a meeting to occur on September 4-5 without a precise labelling of what would take place. Since then, Microsoft, IBM, and VeriSign have all committed to work on the web services security work, which will take place in OASIS. Bob regarded all this as a good thing, given that these companies would likely proceed to make their own standards anyway if the conversations didn't take place in a recognized standards body. Additionally, given the number of people at the table, OASIS's IPR-friendly stances, etc., it is likely that there will be some sort of royalty-free implementation. There's a space between charging for a product and a handshake where this will likely fall. As Bob said, "it's really important for there to be open-source implementations, and if you make it onerous for them, you've shot yourself in the foot."

The work performed by WS-Security does not overlap with Shibboleth, or the current SAML protocols. WS-Security focuses on how security is added to SOAP-based applications and protocols; the security things that are tacked onto SOAP, as it is envisioned, in Bob's words, as the "one true protocol for everything for all time." It remains to be seen how significant the group or its work will end up being. This meshes well with the presented idea that WS-Security isn't intended to be a standards body, but more a forum for interoperability and a mouthpiece for press releases. See www.oasis-open.org/committees/wss/.

- Accounting -

The GGF has recently created a working group on accounting services. This will most likely be focused on questions such as researchers asking how much usage of a certain resource (processor cycles, disk space, bandwidth, etc.) they have left. This can be looked at from the resource provider's point of view, too, such as monitoring access by different inter-realm users. The problems become far more complicated in a distributed, federated environment.

There was some question of whether more of an enterprise presence would be helpful in this working group, but it was unresolved. David feels accounting is just another part of middleware that MACE hasn't gotten around to yet. The IETF hasn't done much work on the accounting part of AAA; the IRTF has been working on it, but their efforts fall more into the sphere of basic research.

- Miscellany -

There will be an NSF-sponsored digital rights management workshop September 9 in Washington, D.C., attended by Cliff Lynch and others, and moderated by Mairéad Martin. The panel will look at architectures on the backend, possibly blessing multiple standards and/or policy engines that must be used. The group will keep its eyes open for potential applications of its efforts to this process.

On the video front, H.323 has opened up the idea of use of web services in videoconferencing with the introduction of a new annex, K. Ken quipped, "if there's any conventional wisdom on inappropriate uses of Shib, we feel chagrined that for years we argued the net is not a webapp, but now, we're turning everything into webapps." Polycom has also revealed a RFP whereby they hope to implement a global CA for videoconferencing devices, which would eventually be leveraged to create a PKI for an integrated office system. [AI] Ken will send the Polycom RFP to the list to give the group a better idea of Polycom's aspirations.

While there is no analogous directory standard to eduPerson in any other language, eduPerson has been finding broader implementation, acceptance and use than English-speaking communities alone. Several Norwegian deployers have used eduPerson, and this is in keeping with the de facto standard of the English language. While eduPerson allows for multilingual attributes, it seems implementors have preferred to stick with the generic English forms.

The group also ruminated for a short while about the usefulness of demonstrations and how much effort should be placed into a proof of concept. An additional fear Michael raised is that a demonstration has a very real possibility of evolving into the established way of doing something, and as such may in fact be destructive.

*Action Items*

1. Keith offered to look back at the survey taken during the Internet2 Spring Member Meeting to determine whether any functions can arise out of that for Advanced CAMP.

2. A call will be set up with the usual suspects to discuss next steps in development of a document process.

3. Ken will send the Polycom RFP to the list to give the group a better idea of Polycom's aspirations.