Authentication Authorization Accounting and Auditing

1. Authentication Authorization Accounting and Auditing Open Issues for irtf AAAARCH working group IWS2000 February 16, 2000 John Vollbrecht Director, Merit AAA Server Consortium jrv@merit.edu Merit Network Inc.

2. AAARCH irtf working group– goals and objectives Research rather than engineering group Long term architecture group, related to AAA working group Architecture and models for AAA/A in 9-12 months Feed full requirements to AAA wg in early 2001 As opposed to AAA ietf wg goals – to have an “interim” protocol requirements by end of March (Adelaide ietf) Hope to recharter as a Protocol selection group and have interim protocol by early 2001

3. AAA infrastructure – vision for the future

4. AAA irtf basic concepts Focus on inter-organization issue Service provider and user-organization each “own” policy Push, Pull, Agent sequences for Authorization Brokers and Proxies as intermediaries between service providers and user-organizations

5. Brokers and Proxies Different types of intermediaries Brokers aggregate applications and/or “user-orgs” Facilitate inter-organization cooperation Proxies promote interaction between AAA servers within an administrative domain Often translate between organization specific and standard interface Much of AAA work deals with how Brokers and Proxies fit with AAA protocols

6. Brokers and Proxies – Requirements- tentative definitions Brokers have business relationship with multiple organizations Implies enough trust to do business Perhaps not “complete” trust Requires audit friendly AAA system Proxies interact with AAA servers in the same organization Implies organizational trust (not network/security trust) Typically uses translate between AAA protocols aggregate AAA servers in an organization Interface to AAA servers in other organizations

7. AAAARCH –Open Issues Data representation Data security Interaction between accounting and authorization State maintenance with no single point of failure Distributed policy Storage/ evaluation/ enforcement Policy description Auditing requirements

8. Data Representation Groups of objects Groups of groups Integrity by group Identify originating and destination server(s) Data Object contents could be Policy description Policy “data” Policy evaluation Possibly Self defining syntax for objects

9. Data Objects

10. Data Object Security Integrity Role of mac vs. signatures Role of intermediary Broker Trusted 3rd party Performance and business model

11. Data Object Security Confidentiality When is it required Examples Clear text password Session key for FA/HA in MobileIP What is required Some external authority trusted by originator and receiver of confidential data object

12. Accounting and Authorization Authorization can include Accounting Policy Accounting to demonstrate that requested policy was implemented ( i.e. that QOS requested was delivered) Requirement for a “session id” to identify Accounting and Authorization activity for the same session

13. State Maintenance State is what is known about a session – often most important is whether the session is currently “up” Information about state of session may be maintained in multiple AAA servers There is one source of authoritative information about each state element of the session Making sure that what is kept in AAA server matches authoritative source is tricky and has led to systems with difficulty doing fail over between a primary and backup server

14. Distributed Session State(proposal)

15. Distributed Policy Policy Description Repository maintained by organizational owner Policy Data Data to be evaluated by policy Policy Enforcement Doing what the Policy describes Owner of policy may not be owner of Policy Data Enforcement of Policy decision may be by different organization than the one defining policy

16. Distributed Policy

17. Auditing With multi-organization process, each organization must trust that others are doing what is expected Auditing verifies that processes are reasonable, appropriate for expected results Equivalent to what CPA would require for standard business systems Expands network management to multi-organization process

18. Some Audit Mechanisms Logging signed requests and session status records Logging by trusted 3rd party of appropriate records Real time “check” that appropriate programs are running Comparing log entries from cooperating servers

19. Summary Active Group working on AAA issues Goal is to find and define a simple mechanism that permits complex services Open mail group We encourage interested people to join the group (mail to jrv@merit.edu or delaat@phys.uu.nl) Questions/ comments? (Thanks)