VidMid VC Conference Call May 3, 2004

[AI] Nadim and Steve will send information about the UMAPP initiative to the Internet Commons.
[AI] All: Please review and comment on the UMAPP initiative draft Tyler e-mailed to the list.

*Attendees*
Paul Hill, MIT
Jill Gemmill, UAB
Tyler Johnson, UAB
Nadim El-Khoury, UNC
Jeanette Fielden, Internet2
Steve Olshansky, Internet2

*Discussion*
Tyler introduced Firewall/NAT traversal for VoIP and video over IP as a potential work item for VidMid-VC. Traversal of Firewalls/NAT’s is a tremendous problem for voice and video over IP. There are a couple of proposals in the IETF and the ITU has created a new work item on the issue. There is a desire for a standard solution for Firewall/NAT traversal. The goal of the work would be to solve the problem generically and propose a specific standard to the ITU and potentially the IETF. The need is for a working group to debate the issue, propose a solution, create a document and submit it to the ITU for feedback.

The proposed work applies to middleware because most proposed schemes for traversal fall apart on the issue of encryption. Jill indicated that there is also the issue, when you do authorization from an end-to-end perspective you don't want to have to look for that information twice. Work would need to be coordinated with SALSA and the middleware diagnostics advisory group to avoid duplicating efforts.

The next step will be to create a one page proposal for the NAT/firewall traversal work.

ITU-T Submissions
Identity Theft Prevention via Gatekeeper Assigned Addressing Mode (GAAM):
Currently there is a security hole in H.323 that allows you to impersonate another user. H.350 defines how to store aliases but doesn't mandate that the gatekeeper use them. A notice has been submitted to the ITU that we should create a new mode of operation where the gatekeeper is required to authenticate the user and use the canonical aliases not the one the endpoint sends.

International MultiMedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC) Universal Multimedia Addressing Platform (UMMAP) Initiative
The IMTC UMMAP Activity Group has been working over the last year to develop guidelines and specifications to facilitate universal addressing for multimedia collaborations. The ultimate goal is that any user could publish their 'multimedia address' and have any other user reach them via that address, regardless of the underlying protocol complexities. The UMMAP activity group has looked at this problem and determined that in fact the existing standards are adequate to solve this problem, but those standards are not widely enough deployed. For example, the H.323 URL solves this problem for H.323, but most vendors still rely on LRQ hierarchies. The SIP deployments are better positioned because of the emphasis on the SIP URI, but the slow roll out of ENUM hinders numeric peering. UMMAP Recommendation A.1 is intended to sharpen the focus on addressing standards in an effort to provide guidance to manufacturers and implementers of multimedia communications systems and will be positioned as an industry specification. The group is seeking feedback on the draft that Tyler e-mailed to the VidMid list.

Tanberg has joined Internet2 as a corporate sponsor.