IP Security Policy
charter-ietf-ipsp-01

The rapid growth of the Internet and the need to control access to
network resources (bandwidth, routers, hosts, etc.) has quickly
generated the need for representing, discovering, exchanging and
managing the policies that control access to these resources in a
scalable, secured and reliable fashion.

Current IP security protocols and algorithms [RFCs 2401-2412, 2085,
2104 and 2451] can exchange keying material using IKE [RFC2409] and
protect data flows using the AH [RFC2402] and/or ESP protocols
[RFC2406]. The scope of IKE limits the protocol to the authenticated
exchange of keying material and associated policy information between
the end-points of a security association.

However, along the path of a communication, there may be
administrative entities that need to impose policy constraints on
entities such as security gateways and router filters. There also is
a need for end-points of a security association and/or, for their
respective administrative entities, to securely discover and negotiate
access control information for the end hosts and for the policy
enforcement points (security gateways, routers, etc.) along the path
of the communication.

To address these problems the IPSP Working Group will:

1) Specify a repository-independant Information Model for supporting
IP security Policies. This model preferrably derives from the
Information Model as defined in the Policy Framework WG.

2) Develop or adopt an extensible policy specification language.
The language should be generic enough to support policies in
other protocol domains, but must provide the necessary security
mechanisms that are vital to IPSEC.

3) provide guidelines for the provisioning of IPsec policies
using existing policy distribution protocols. This includes
profiles for distributing IPsec policies over protocols
such as LDAP, COPS, SNMP, and FTP,

4) adopt or develop a policy exchange and negotiation
protocol. The protocol must be capable of: i) discovering
policy servers, ii) distributing and negotiating security
policies, and; iii) resolving policy conflicts in both
intra/inter domain environments. The protocol must be
independent of any security protocol suite and key
management protocol. Existing protocol work in the IETF, such as
SLP, will be considered if such protocols meet the requirements
of this work.

5) Work with the "Policy Terminology" design team to define a common
set of terms used in documents in the area of Policy Based
(Network) Management.

The proposed work item for this group would yield standards that are
compatible with the existing IPsec architecture [RFC 2401] and IKE
[RFC 2409], complementing the standards work achieved by the IPsec
Working Group. The data model, specification language and exchange
protocol will evolve from some of the work previously published in the
following documents:

    draft-ietf-ipsec-policy-model-00.txt

    draft-ietf-ipsec-vpn-policy-schema-00.txt

    draft-ietf-ipsec-spsl-00.txt

    draft-ietf-ipsec-sps-00.txt

    draft-ietf-ipsec-secconf-00.txt

This group will also coordinate with other IETF working groups working
on specifying policies and policies schemas in order to maintain
compatibility and interoperability. In particular, this working group
will work closely with the Policy Framework WG to ensure that the
IPsec Policy Information and data model fits and can be supported
within the general Policy Framework.