On May 5, 2011, at 11:41 PM, Yaron Sheffer wrote:

Hi,

I think we are going down a rathole on the issue of "authenticated identity". 
Most IKE gateways, like many other security devices, normally make policy 
decisions based on groups. I will provide secure connectivity to 
anyb...@this-isp.com<mailto:anyb...@this-isp.com>, but not to 
anyb...@that-isp.com<mailto:anyb...@that-isp.com>. But I don't want to 
differentiate j...@isp.com<mailto:j...@isp.com> from 
j...@isp.com<mailto:j...@isp.com>.

True, but often we cut the groups finer than that. If John works in sales and 
Jane works in R&D, they may have different authorizations (John does not go 
near the source control, Jane does not get to see the financial statement to be 
published next week). To negotiate the appropriate selectors, the gateway needs 
some group information. This can be done by abusing some RADIUS attribute to 
convey policy information, or else by querying a directory with the username 
received in EAP.

With ephemeral identities I don't see how this could work, unless we assume 
that there is a way for the gateway to query the AAA about some attributes of 
the user behind the EMSKNAme.


It seems to me RFC 4306/5996 took the concept a bit further than RFC 4301 ever 
intended (in fact I believe the text is new to RFC 5996). Presumably, when we 
talk about identity-based policy decisions, we refer to 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4301#section-4.4.3. This text (and the following 
section) explicitly allows for "bulk" policies that apply to "@example.com", 
i.e. anybody at that domain. And such coarse granularity may be sufficient in 
practice for inter-ISP traffic: ISP1 may be happy to provide secure 
connectivity to ISP2's customers and take a cut of the business, even if it 
doesn't know the exact identity of each customer and cannot contact them, bill 
them or log their names.

So I would suggest that the draft should mention that no individual 
authenticated identity is available in the typical case (and this is 
unfortunately in conflict with RFC 5996), but the obscured identity provided in 
RADIUS Access-Accept can be used to make legitimate policy decisions.

I'm not even sure of that. Qin, does ERP give us the domain name of the 
original authenticating server?  Do we even know if the user came from this-isp 
or that-isp?


Thanks,
    Yaron

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