Re: [Nea] UPDATED: WG Review: Network Endpoint Assessment (nea)

["Mike Fratto" <mfratto at gmail.com>]

On 10/24/06, Keith Moore <moore at cs.utk.edu> wrote:
> As far as I can tell, this is the crux of the problem with NEA - that in
> general it's simply unreasonable for a network to demand that every host
> that connect to it conform to arbitrary policies for configuration of
> those hosts.  IETF should not be standardizing unreasonable
> expectations. And even if the behavior is in some limited set of
> circumstances reasonable (which is debatable), IMHO IETF should hesitate
> to define standards for corner cases.

Whether a company manageing a network demands that all hosts meet a
specific policy is a local policy issue and the charter specifically
addresses this concern:

"An organization may make a range of policy decisions based on the
posture of an endpoint. NEA is not intended to be prescriptive in
this regard. "

I think the intent of the working group is to standardize the data
formats and protocols so that NEA components can talk together, not to
say what to do with non-compliant hosts. That is a local policy
decsion. But to get to that decision, the components first have to
communicate.

At a very high level, this isn't much different than RADIUS, which
defines the data formats and protocols between a network access device
such as modem pool and the RADIUS server. Vendor specific attributes
are supported and the standards don't attempt to provide
*meaning*--that is left upto the vendor defining the specific
attributes.

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