NOTE: This charter is a snapshot of the 48th IETF Meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It may now be out-of-date. Last Modified: 17-Jul-00
Chair(s):
Tim Polk <wpolk@nist.gov>
Patrick Cain <pcain@bbn.com>
Security Area Director(s):
Jeffrey Schiller <jis@mit.edu>
Marcus Leech <mleech@nortelnetworks.com>
Security Area Advisor:
Marcus Leech <mleech@nortelnetworks.com>
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Description of Working Group:
For trust models to be truly portable across the Internet, transactions must be anchored so they are comparable. The one shared commodity that can be widely agreed upon is time, and the ability to authenticate the source of the time can assist in providing such portability in trust. The ability to securely obtain time from authenticated sources is thus becoming a key factor in security and non-repudiation.
Current IETF protocols address the distribution of time, and there is also a project for the generation of cryptographically protected timestamps. Existing approaches to distributing time are vulnerable to external attack and tampering, as these do not take advantage of advances in public key infrastructure and cryptographic methods, and require distribution of cryptographic keys via nonscalable out-of-band means. Securing time distribution using PKI mechanisms allows the process to scale and minimizes risk.
The purpose of this working group is to define the message formats and protocols - specifically, modifications to the existing Network Time Protocol (NTP) - which are necessary to support the authenticated distribution of time for the Internet. The working group will be chartered for a period of 12 months to meet this goal. Utilization of previous research in this area is expected.
Work will concentrate on the Internet-based NTP, to be enhanced with the addition of public-key based authentication and security. The working group expects to enhance NTP by way of occasional "setup" interchanges between client and time server to establish a shared secret, followed by normal NTP interchanges secured via the shared secret. The output of the working group is expected to be a standards-track document.
Goals and Milestones:
Aug 99 |
|
Submit 3rd draft of Authentication Scheme Extensions to NTP as an I-D |
Nov 99 |
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Submit 4th draft of Authentication Scheme Extensions to NTP as an I-D |
Mar 00 |
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Submit Authentication Scheme Extensions to NTP to IESG for consideration as an RFC |
Internet-Drafts:
No Request For Comments
None received.
None received.