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Thoughts on OPES charter

2001-12-10 20:25:16

Hi,

please apologize sending this on such short notice, but I used the flight into SLC trying to reflect some of the recent discussions, the IAB considerations and parts from Lee's recent charter proposal in a possible charter re-write.

Please be aware that these are my own INDIVIDUAL thoughts and do not represent group consensus of any kind. I hesitated to distribute these via the mailing list, as I was just looking for initial comments from a few folks, which would be helpful in further discussions. However, given the upcoming meeting tomorrow, Ned suggested to send it out to the list anyway.

Thanks,
  Markus

=========================================================
Some individual thoughts in OPES charter re-write
=========================================================

Description of Working Group:

The Internet facilitates the development of networked services at the application-level that both offload origin servers and improve the user experience. Intermediaries are commonly deployed to provide such services, for example web caching, request filtering or virus scanning. Lack of mechanisms to trace and to control such intermediaries causes problems with respect to failure detection, data integrity and security.

The Open Pluggable Edge Services (opes) working group is to define a framework that enables provisioning of networked services at application-level devices inside the network (OPES services), while maintaining the network's robustness and end-to-end data integrity. This implies that services provided in the OPES framework should be traceable by the application endpoints of an OPES-involved transaction, thus helping end-users to detect and to respond to inappropriate behavior by OPES components. In particular, services provided in the OPES framework should be reversible by mutual agreement of the application endpoints. Furthermore, the OPES framework must require that provisioning of OPES services be explicitly authorized by at least one of the application-layer endpoints (i.e. either the content provider or the content consumer).

In a first step, this working group will investigate whether the architecture to be developed must be compatible with the use of end-to-end encryption. Based on this decision, it will examine the requirements for both authorization and invocation of application services inside the network. Services considered in this context are applied to application messages that are delivered to the user via HTTP or RTP/RTSP. The working group will define one or more methods for specification and distribution of policies and rules that enable application endpoints to control execution of such services. Furthermore, the working group will specify one or more protocols that allow invocation and tracking of such services inside the network. As part of these tasks, the working group will evaluate the applicability of existing work within the IETF (e.g. IETF Policy Framework) and other organizations.

As such, the group's work items can be listed as:
- Draft high-level, overall OPES architecture
- Define requirements for service authorization (policy)
- Define requirements for service invocation and tracing (callout)
- Define policy specification method(s) and policy distribution
  protocol(s)
- Define callout and tracing protocol(s)

As solutions for these problems are developed, the IAB considerations specified in RFCxxx must be addressed.

Deliverables:
- OPES use cases and scenarios
- General OPES framework
- Requirements for authorization and enforcement of OPES services
- Requirements for invocation and tracking of OPES services
- Methods and protocols for policy distribution and enforcement
- Mechanisms and protocols for service invocation and service tracking



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