ietf-mxcomp
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Draft Charter milestone sequence

2004-03-17 08:43:40

Ted,



A thought on the milestones:

Given the long and difficult history of discussion about MTA-based
authentication:

     An effort to first choose the identity that is being
     authenticated, before discussing concrete proposals, is likely to
     suffer too much abstraction.

This is not a topic and this is not a group of participants with much
success as such fuzziness.

That said, I think that agreeing on the identity, before choosing the
the authentication _mechanism_, is a good thing.  It gives us a tight,
incremental approach to the process, and we need all the process help we
can get.

How to resolve the problem?

     I suggest that we have a deadline for _semantic_ proposals, before
     we attempt to choose an identity.

That is, folks should submit a description of the identity and the
proposed approach to its authentication, without the syntax or other
protocol details. Hence the discussion of choice of identity can refer
to proposals associated, without having to get bogged down in their gory
details.

So, we might have 3 proposals for identity X and 2 for identity Y.  We
could choose X or Y without deciding which of the proposals.  This gives
us incremental steps in the fashion you are attempting, but gives a
sense of the ways identities will be authenticated as input to the
identity-choosing exercise.

d/
--
 Dave Crocker <dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com>
 Brandenburg InternetWorking <www.brandenburg.com>
 Sunnyvale, CA  USA <tel:+1.408.246.8253>


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