Vidya good commentary, maybe I can add some more. The NEA, per the
charter-need's justification statement says:
Network Endpoint Assessment (NEA) architectures have been implemented
in the industry to assess the "posture" of endpoint devices
Ah two new terms of Art - "Posture" and "Devices".
for the
purposes of monitoring compliance to an organization's posture policy
here again we have Posturing... but now its a policy. The policy of dancing
or what? so is this posture relative to the Security Policy? or how about
the Operations Integrity Policy? And is the Posture erect or is it rolling
on the floor laughing ones ...
and optionally restricting access until the endpoint has been updated
This is a statement of effect rather than describing the thing itself. This
comment is specific to what the design of the NEA would do and not what the
NEA is but what the hey...
So then this 'thingee', the 'Posture manager', is something that is an
agent that lives in the computer to make sure its doing what its supposed to
and has all of the stuff its supposed to be, right? So the NEA seems to be
an integrity management and compliance agent right? Which means you want to
go to blows with Tripwire and the Change Management Integrity of Operations
people too? Nice...
Tripwire and Aide seem to be things that do that - Fremont and COPS too. The
configuration management is Titan and YASSP or other hardening scripts. The
logging and setup for managing the logging is already in place too. So where
does this 'compliance assurance thingee' live in that array?
to satisfy the posture requirements.
Again - I gotta mention that you are doing alot of posturing there... So
guys - here we go again - which posture is it this time??? bent over
backwards or what?
An endpoint that does not comply
with posture policy may be vulnerable to a number of known threats
that may exist on the network.
And here we have the justification for the service proposed in the charter
statement... come on guys...
The intent of NEA is to facilitate
corrective actions to address these known vulnerabilities before a
host is exposed to potential attack.
Ahhh... Inline and continuous hardening and reporting. So then is this the
creation of the IETF's version of an embedded Titan or YASSP? Does that real
make sense. If it does, why not just run Titan and YASSP through SNMP,
or buy Tripwire, or use Aide and SNORT, or ... you get my point I hope.
Try this:
"The NEA is a process and methodology to integrate ongoing integrity and
process refinement into the operations of network services. The principal
goal of the NEA is a higher set of reporting models to support those
required by today's network operators for their IT Infrastructure Integrity
Programs"
And the process statement:
"To facilitate this goal, the NEA provides Audit and Systemic
Integrity/Change Management as integrated features and provides proper
evidentiary models to support this under whatever level of scrutiny is
required. Scrutiny including as formal evidence with Chain of Custody issues
to address as well"
and finally:
"To accomplish these ends, the NEA may use pieces of other services or
technologies in creating this Open Framework for operating integrity and its
evidentiary documentation."
Todd Glassey
----- Original Message -----
From: "Narayanan, Vidya" <vidyan(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com>
To: <iesg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>; <ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Cc: <nea(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2006 9:58 AM
Subject: RE: [Nea] WG Review: Network Endpoint Assessment (nea)
All,
Comments on the charter inline below.
-----Original Message-----
From: IESG Secretary [mailto:iesg-secretary(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org]
Sent: Monday, October 02, 2006 7:30 AM
To: ietf-announce(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Cc: nea(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: [Nea] WG Review: Network Endpoint Assessment (nea)
A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Security Area.
The IESG has not made any determination as yet. The following draft
charter was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes
only.
Please send your comments to the IESG mailing list
(iesg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org) by October 9.
+++
Network Endpoint Assessment (nea)
======================================
Current Status: Proposed Working Group
Chair(s):
TBD
Security Area Director(s):
Russ Housley <housley(_at_)vigilsec(_dot_)com>
Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu>
Security Area Advisor:
Russ Housley <housley(_at_)vigilsec(_dot_)com>
Mailing List: nea(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Description of Working Group:
Network Endpoint Assessment (NEA) architectures have been implemented
in the industry to assess the "posture" of endpoint devices for the
purposes of monitoring compliance to an organization's posture policy
and optionally restricting access until the endpoint has been updated
to satisfy the posture requirements. An endpoint that does not comply
with posture policy may be vulnerable to a number of known threats
that may exist on the network. The intent of NEA is to facilitate
corrective actions to address these known vulnerabilities before a
host is exposed to potential attack.
Is it fair to then say that NEA is attempting to protect the endhost and
not necessarily the network? That is not immediately clear in the
charter. Obviously, the network must deal with all kinds of known and
unknown threats and a process like NEA is inadequate to protect it at
any acceptable level. That is why we employ a number of other mechanisms
like firewalls, access control, packet filters, IDS/IPS, etc. in any
combination to appropriately protect the networks.
So, stating that NEA is not attempting to protect the network at large
would bring a lot of clarity to the charter.
Two deployment scenarios will be supported: advisory mode and
mandatory mode.
In advisory mode, an endpoint may be advised of the result of posture
assessment and any recommended remediation actions, but is provided
normal network access regardless of the result. In mandatory mode, a
non-compliant endpoint is given restricted access to the network
sufficient for remediation purposes and any essential services or
denied access completely.
It is unclear how the advisory vs mandatory model relates to the NEA
procedures itself. NEA is attempting to provide a vehicle to perform
some compliance tests on acceptable "postures". What the network decides
to do with that information seems entirely dependent on the policy of
the network and the extent of non-compliance, etc. What does it mean to
say that NEA *allows* an advisory and/or a mandatory model?
Posture refers to the hardware or software configuration of an
endpoint as it pertains to an organization's security policy. Posture
may include knowledge that software installed to protect the machine
(e.g. patch management software, anti-virus software, host firewall
software, host intrusion protection software or any custom software)
is enabled and up-to-date.
On network access and while connected, an endpoint supporting NEA
protocols can be queried for such posture information in either
advisory or mandatory modes.
Again, what does it mean to be queried in a particular mode?
Since NEA involves many different components from different vendors,
interoperation
s/interoperation/interoperability
is highly desirable. The priority of
the NEA working group is to standardize protocols at the higher layers
in the architectures:
the Posture Attribute protocol (PA) and the Posture Broker protocol
(PB).
PA and PB will be designed to support a variety of lower layer
protocols.
When used with standards for lower layers, these new protocols will
allow interoperability between an NEA Client from one vendor and an
NEA Server from another.
This seems like an optimistic goal. Given that only a subset of
attributes are envisioned to be standardized and given that the kind of
attributes are likely to be ever increasing, considering that posture
refers to hardware/software configuration of an endpoint, I fail to see
how we would practically get NEA clients and NEA servers from different
vendors to perform any meaningful NEA procedures. In theory, I can see
how this can be slated to be a goal - but, I have to believe that
reality would be different.
Since there are already several non-standard protocols at
these higher layers, the NEA working group will consider
these existing protocols as candidates for standardization. A
requirements document will be written and used as a basis for
evaluating the candidate protocols.
The working group may decide to standardize one of the
candidate protocols, use one of them as a basis for a new or
revised protocol, or decide that a new protocol is needed.
The NEA Requirements document will include a problem
statement, definition of terms, requirements for the PA and
PB protocols, and an overall security analysis. It will also
include generic requirements for the protocol transporting
PA, PB: the Posture Transport protocol (PT). PT protocols may
be standardized in other WGs since these protocols may not be
specific to NEA. The NEA WG will identify one mandatory to
implement PT protocol to ensure interoperability.
I assume that the mandatory to implement PT protocol must satisfy the
criteria that will allow the NEA process to be triggered at any time
(i.e., during or after network access). Clarifying this would be good.
PA, the Posture Attribute protocol, consists of posture
attributes that are carried between a particular Posture
Collector in a NEA client and a particular Posture Validator
in a NEA Server. The PA protocol is carried inside the PB
protocol. Certain posture attributes will be standardized to
ensure interoperability but vendor-specific attributes will
also be supported. Vendor-specific attributes must be
documented in an RFC.
This goes back to my comment on interoperability. Unless it is expected
that there will be ongoing efforts to continually standardize attributes
of significance to the community as the hardware/software configurations
of devices evolve, I am afraid that we won't have interoperability of
any significance.
The PB (Posture Broker) protocol aggregates posture
attributes from one or more Posture Collectors in an NEA
client and sends them to the NEA server for assessment by one
or more Posture Validators.
The PT (Posture Transport) protocol (or stack of protocols)
is suitable for carrying the PB protocol at the time of
network connection, or shortly after.
The NEA working group will not specify protocols other than
PA and PB at this time. The expectation is that an existing
protocol can be used for the PT.
One commonly discussed issue with NEA systems is how to
handle compromised endpoints, whose reports of their own
posture may not be accurate. Detecting or handling such
endpoints is out of scope of the NEA WG. Work on PA will
focus on attributes useful for assessing posture of those
endpoints reporting accurate information. However, the
protocols developed by the NEA WG must be designed to
accommodate emerging technologies for identifying and dealing
with lying endpoints.
I'm not sure what the last sentence means here - everything in this
paragraph alludes to the fact that lying endpoints are out of scope. If
the last sentence is alluding to the TCG efforts, why is it cryptic? As
currently stated, it doesn't seem to add any value. If we say that in
order for NEA to have a meaningful use case, it must work together with
some of the TCG stuff, then, perhaps that is effort that the WG must
ensure gets done.
Note that NEA is not chartered to standardize protocols for
remediation.
NEA is intended to be used with new or existing tools that
can be used in the absence of NEA. There is an open issue
with respect to NEA applicability in deployment scenarios
where the endpoint is owned by a party that is different from
the organization providing network access.
Why is this an open issue? When the endpoint and the organization
providing network access are owned by different parties, it simply does
not seem to be viable to do any kind of configuration assessment on the
endpoint. I think this should be stated rather clearly along these
lines:
"NEA is limited in applicability to the case where the endpoint is owned
by the organization providing network access and performing the
assessment. In the cases where the two belong to a different party, it
is practically infeasible for an organization providing network access
to perform any kind of posture assessment or related compliance tests on
the endpoint."
Thanks,
Vidya
Further work in the NEA WG will be considered via the
standard rechartering process after the completion of these
milestones.
Milestones:
June 2006:
* Submit first version of NEA Requirements I-D
July 2006:
* Agree on charter and milestones at IETF 66
October 2006:
* Submit first draft of NEA Requirements I-D
November 2006:
* At IETF 67, discuss issues with NEA Requirements I-D
* Agree on solutions to issues with NEA Requirements I-D
December 2006:
* Deadline for submission of candidate specs for PA and PB
* Submit first version of NEA Evaluation I-D
January 2007:
* WG Last Call on NEA Evaluation I-D
February 2007:
* Submit NEA Requirements I-D and Evaluation I-D to IESG as Info RFC
* Submit first draft of PA and PB specs for review
March 2007:
* Discuss unresolved issues with PA and PB specs at IETF 68
* Agree on solutions to unresolved issues with PA and PB specs
April 2007:
* Submit revised draft of PA and PB specs
June 2007
* WG Last Call on PA and PB specs
July 2007
* Resolve outstanding WGLC comments on PA and PB specs at IETF 69
August 2007:
* Submit PA and PB specs to IESG for publication as Proposed
September 2007:
* Decide how to address MTI PT, recharter if needed
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