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RE: [TLS] TLS WG Chair Comments on draft-ietf-tls-authz-07

2009-02-13 04:41:28
Hi Hans,

Hannes wrote:
Melinda wrote:

and that there are
some non-trivial advantages to carrying authorizations in-band.
Namely... 

I don't wish to speak for Melinda, but this is a view shared by many 
within my own community.

I have a long list of applications, collected from within this 
community, with which they would like to use SAML-based 
authorisation;

Interesting. Any interest to share it with us?

I'm in the process of trying to flesh it out at the moment, in a
collaboration with some of the communities concerned, so that we can
articulate some concrete use-cases. At the moment the list covers pretty
much everything that is presently used in an Inter-Institutional context
(AFS, SSH, VNC, RDP, SIP, SMTP, NEA, ...).

and it seems to me that the ability for application 
protocols to share 
a common mechanism for expressing authorisation would mitigate or 
perhaps even avoid the need to make application-specific 
authorisation 
extensions.

My experience: authorization is often related to the specific 
application domain.

I agree insofar as 'authorisation' is often an exercise in making
statements using semantics that are specific to application domains, but
I don't believe it follows that the syntactical and transport elements
(that support the semantic expression) also need to be specific to the
application domain.

Furthermore, working on SIP SAML I noticed the problems when 
you go down to specific solutions scenarios.

Can you expand?

(The fact that SAML-based Web SSO uses SAML that is bound to the 
application-layer is, I believe, only an artifact of a 
requirement to 
avoid modifying contemporary Web browsers and I don't think it is an 
approach that would necessarily be desirable for the general case.)

... a reasonable transition plan, in my view.

Sure.

The reason for the success of these IdM solutions, 
particularly OpenID.

(Well - OpenID has been a flop in my opinion. It has its uses, but not
very interesting ones. But I digress...)

Binding authorisation to TLS, as suggested by this document, is one 
approach that would satisfy the 'common mechanism'
requirement indicated previously.

Looking forward to see your solutions.

I have no answers; I'm still trying to figure out what the questions are
:-/

josh.

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