Re: Fwd: NEA requirements (was Re: Fwd: [Nea] Re: use of a design team to develop requirements)

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

> > So what does an NEA server make a decision on?
>
> who says the NEA server has to make a (nontrivial) decision?

who said the decision is trivial or non-trivial? I don't even know
what that means.

> if the
> client presents a statement, signed by a key that is traceable to a host
> and a product, that says that the host conforms to a certain level of a
> profile, what more does the server need to do other than to tell the
> network to give the host whatever level of access corresponds to that
> profile?

Ok, I am going to pass on the key signing for the moment. It's an
implementation issue and can be discussed later. Your general point,
one where the client sends a statement that it conforms to a level of
profile makes sense make sense but I have two questions.

1) How do you propose the handshake happen?
2) What happens in the case where a NEA client doesn't send sufficient
information to the NEA server for the NEA server to make a decision?

> > That could be a query/response or it could be notification mechanism,
> > though the latter is highly inflexible and severly limiting.
>
> yes, but that's the point - the limitations are highly desirable in
> reducing the threat of NEA to privacy, and they don't get in the way of
> letting NEA do the job that it is designed to do.  they also have the
> advantage of making NEA a fairly trivial protocol to design and
> implement, allowing the standard to get to market much more quickly.

I was not referring to privacy limitations. Remember, I don't think
privacy is much of an issue. The limitations in a notification
mechanism is that the communication is one-way with no chance for the
two system to converge. The policy decision comes down to "Did the NEA
client send me what I need to know?" and "Does that fit my policy?" If
the exchange fails at question 1 and there is no recourse for the NEA
server to query the NEA client for more information, then the exchange
ends. That is inflexible and a non-starter.

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