*MACE Conference Call*
April 3, 2006

*Attendees*

Bob Morgan (chair) - Washington
Leif Johansson - Stockholm/SUNET
Paul Hill - MIT
Jim Jokl - Virginia
Michael Gettes - Duke
Steve Carmody - Brown
Renee Frost - Michigan/Internet2
Scott Cantor - OSU
Steve Olshansky - Internet2
Tom Barton - Chicago
Lynn McRae - Stanford
Ken Klingenstein - Colorado/Internet2
Keith Hazelton - Wisconsin
Mark Poepping - Carnegie Mellon

*Discussion*

The group reviewed last week's Signet/Grouper installfest. There was a surprising amount of demand for basic documentation on the intended uses of these products, and on how they fit together with each other and with other NMI components. Lynn noted that the Signet and Grouper design, UI, and packaging are quite different; they don't seem like elements of a single suite. The Signet/Grouper event drew about 40 people from about 15 institutions -- mostly universities, plus the Fox Chase Cancer Center.

The group reviewed developments at IETF. Materials from many of these sessions are available at https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/meeting_materials.cgi?meeting_num=65.
- The DIX BoF decided it doesn't yet have the makings of a working group. This BoF is concerned with SXIP's interest in becoming an IETF standard for high-volume but low-value transactions, like authenticating to a blog. Others are working on a stripped-down version of SAML for this purpose.
- The DKIM working group is making good progress toward a standard.
- The network endpoint assessment (NEA) BoF is working on standardizing a protocol for verifying that machines have necessary patches, anti-virus software, etc. Leif suggested that it's important for eduRoam to follow these discussions.
- The SIP WG has accepted Jeff Hodges' SAML-for-SIP as a work item. Leif noted there's also a P2P-SIP BoF.
- There is growing interest in Nicolas Williams' concept of "channel binding", which lets higher layers find out what security functions are being provided at lower layers, so these functions don't have to be duplicated.

Upcoming meetings:
- The 3rd TERENA NREN-Grids Workshop is April 27-28 in Paris; see http://www.terena.nl/activities/nrens-n-grids/workshop-03/.
- The Advanced CAMP on Workflow is June 29-30 in Burlington, VT (following CAMP Shibboleth). Bob is looking for input from the campuses -- both examples of workflow systems you're using now, and what you expect to need in future.

Bob noted the launch of openidp.org, which has been developed to meet the growing demand for a freely-available IdP run as a production service. Openidp is essentially "LoA zero", which is expected to be fine for many users; Nine Star, a Texas startup that provides commercial support for Shibboleth, is developing a similar service that will offer greater assurance. Bob asks that the group let him know of applications that need openidp and similar services.