Subject: Draft 0 - KRB-WG Minneapolis meeting

From: "Douglas E. Engert" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 10:42:28 -0600

To those present at the WG meeting, especially the speakers, please review these 
minutes, and make comments about these minutes. Did I missed something, or got 
something wrong? 

Thanks. 

KRB-WG Minutes - Minneapolis 

The third meeting of the Kerberos WG was held 3/20/2001 in Minneapolis with about 50
attendees. Doug Engert was the chair and Matt Crawford was the scribe. After a short 
introduction of the working group, the bulk of the meeting was concerned with discussions
of the Kerberos-Revisions and the Referrals. 

Cliff Neuman described a number of minor changes to the Revisions, then turn the 
discussion over to Ken Reaburn to discuss the new Section 6. Still to be done
include updating the table of key usage numbers, have a cryptographer review the 
functions and decide which crypto functions should be available to applications. 
Further comments on Section 6 should be sent to Ken. There where some questions.
Should there be a NULL checksum method? No one could see a need for one. 
Are there other crypto methods in use? And will can they follow this section?
John Brezak said the RC4-HMAC could. Will AES also fit? Ken is working on this too,
and answered yes, all that is needed are test vectors. What does visibility of crypto
functions have to do with a protocol? The response was left open. 

Tom Yu then described the new section 5. This section tries to address many backward 
compatibility issues, but adds a lot of complexity to the draft. Tom had proposed
a new KerberosString to address the UTF-8 issues. What came out was that the current
(mis) use of the GerneralString in Kerberos is locality specific. Most implementations
just treat a GeneralString as a bit string, so if all parties agreed, it worked.
There appears that there will need to be some hint in the rest of the message 
(such as in the flags or options) to indicate if GeneralString should be treaded
following ASN.1 rules, or as Kerberos has in the past.  

Tom had also proposed a number of new message types which where designed to be extensible
version of older message types. For example a Ticket2. These where being introduced for 
backwards compatibility. There where still compatibility issues with the new messages
such as how is a client or KDC to know if the other implementation can handle the
new messages. 

There was concern that much of the Section 5 was over kill, and it could introduce
new ASN.1 problems which could also cause backward compatibility problems
and since there where so many problems, we should consider bumping the version number.
It was decide that a smaller group would meet after the WG meeting to discuss the 
Section 5 issues further. (See below for notes from that meeting.)

John Brezak then described the Referrals and name canonicalization documents. At one time
this was a separate document, then last year we tried to roll it into the Revisions,
which appears to have been a mistake, as there are still many concerns with the
referrals. It is not back to a separate document. The Revisions still has the 
necessary flags and numbers reserved. John gave a history of why this was needed,
in organizations with large flat name spaces, where uses may want to keep the same 
name, but be moved to other realms. Since there was so many concerns including GSSAPI
name canonicalization issued, a smaller group would meet later in the week to 
hash out the issues and concerns. There was not general opposition to the concepts,
but there was security concerns as to how it should be implemented.  

Cliff then continued with the Revisions, and there was general consensus that all
the text in the Revisions referring to name canonicalization and referrals work 
could dropped, as these are covered by the Referrals. This will let us move forward 
on the Revisions. 

Brian Tung described the latest revision to PKINIT. The recent last call had a number
of concerns, and a new draft was produced. There are still some issues with  E-E DH.
Matt Hur brought up some issues with a nonce to indicate willingness to accept a 
timestamp.  But the draft could be ready for last call again in two weeks. (Still 
subject to reference to the Revisions, and the flags in the Revisions for PKINIT.)

Ken Hornstein presented KDC and Realm Information with DNS and said another draft
is needed, and could be ready in a month or two for last call.

Jonathan Trostle presented the Kerberos changes/set password I-D update 
and the IAKERB. Both of these need some minor changes. 

Donna Skibbie present KDC LDAP Schema. This draft missed the cutoff, but she was invited
to speak on this again, so that the working group could give more input, and deiced
if this had merit. The presentation was accepted rather well, with even some comments on
using this as the admin interface, include updating keys. The consensus was that this 
should go forward. Other interested in this work should contact Donna, and she 
was going to submit this as a draft, and possible a draft which could access the keys as
well. It would then be up to the Area Directors if these should be assigned to this 
working group. 

Twelve people then meet after the meeting to discuss Sections 5 issues. The main outcome
of this was that the revisions is trying to do to many things at once. It should be
cut back to address only interoperability problems, features which are currently being
implemented and some interoperability problems. In effect it would document 
Kerberos V5.1. New features should be let to a V5.2 Revisions.  Tom Yu was to come up
with the list for what should be in V5.1.  

-- 

 Douglas E. Engert  <[email-masked]>
 Argonne National Laboratory
 9700 South Cass Avenue
 Argonne, Illinois  60439 
 (630) 252-5444