Subject: Direction for extensions

From: [email-masked] (Sam Hartman)
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 21:42:34 -0400 (EDT)

At the last IETF, Tom Yu's proposal for a starting point for Kerberos
Extensions was presented.  There seemed to be some interest in
pursuing this proposal as a starting point for the group's work,
although I don't think we got to a point where we had a consensus to
do so.

Since then no other proposals have been made.  It is my understanding
that Tom is working on updates to his proposal to continue fleshing it
out and that he plans to submit an 01 version of his draft for IETF
60.

As soon as it is published, I'd like to ask the working group to
review Tom's 01 draft and adopt it as our starting point.

I think we also need to revisit how many ASN.1 features we are using.
At the Boulder meeting we agreed to use several ASN.1 features
including components of notation and the ASN.1 object model.  That
agreement was contingent on having tools that could convert an ASN.1
module using these features into a simpler ASN.1 module that meets
implementers' needs.

A few months ago I asked if anyone had resources to develop these
tools; silence was my response.  I believe that MIT can dedicate some
resources to this problem but not enough to use all the ASN.1 features
presented at Boulder.  I believe that we will be able to use ASN.1
parameterized types and ASN.1 choices,but unless someone else has tool
resources to dedicate to the problem we will have to drop the other
ASN.1 features we wanted to use.

I'll also note that since the Boulder meeting, several working group
participants have questioned our decision to use these ASN.1 features.
We may very well end up scaling back our use of ASN.1 features even if
tool resources do not force us to do so.

--Sam