Authorization and Access Control (aac) Charter
NOTE: This charter is accurate as of the 31st IETF Meeting in San Jose. It
may now be out-of-date. (Consider this a "snapshot" of the working
group from that meeting.) Up-to-date charters for all active working
groups can be found elsewhere in this Web server.
Chair(s)
- Clifford Neuman <bcn@isi.edu>
Security Area Director(s):
- Jeffrey Schiller <jis@mit.edu>
Mailing List Information
- General Discussion:ietf-aac@isi.edu
- To Subscribe: ietf-aac-request@isi.edu
- Archive: prospero.isi.edu:~/pub/aac/*
Description of Working Group
The goal of the Authorization and Access Control Working Group
is to develop guidelines and an Application Programming Interface
(API) through which network accessible applications can uniformly
specify access control information. This API will allow
applications to make access control decisions when clients are
not local users, might not be members of a common organization,
and often not known to the service or application in advance.
Several authentication mechanisms are in place on the Internet,
but most applications are written with local applications in
mind and no guidelines exist for supporting authorization
and access control based on the output of such authentication
mechanisms. The CAT Working Group developed the GSS-API,
a common API to support authentication. The AAC Working Group
will develop a common API that accepts the identity of a
client (perhaps the output of the GSS-API), a reference to an
object to be accessed, and optionally an indication of the
operation to be performed. The API will return a list of
authorized operations or a yes/no answer that can be easily
used by the application.
A second, longer term purpose of the working group will be to
examine evolving mechanisms and architectures for authorization in
distributed systems and to establish criteria which enable
interworking of confidence and trust across systems. The working
group will develop additional goals and milestones related to
this purpose and will submit a revised charter once the appropriate
goals and milestones are determined. To the extent possible this
additional work will encourage evolution toward credential formats
that more readily allow support for or translation across multiple
mechanisms.
Goals and Milestones
- Done
- Submit charter and milestones for approval. Done Meet at the Columbus IETF to identify common characteristics of evolving distributed authorization mechanisms and begin discussion of approaches for interoperability across mechanisms.
- Jun 93
- Post draft API as an Internet-Draft. Jun 93 Post an Internet-Draft of the guidelines for authorization and access control for network accessible applications. Aug 93 Submit the AAC guidelines document for approval as an Informational RFC. Jan 94 Submit the AAC API for consideration as an Experimental RFC.
No Current Internet-Drafts
No Request for Comments