draft minutes for ldapbis WG meeting at IETF 62

Draft minutes for the March meeting, corrections to the list please.

  - RL "Bob"

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ldapbis WG meeting
IETF 62, Minneapolis, MN USA
2005-03-10
scribe:  RL "Bob" Morgan


The meeting was called to order at 1530 by co-chairs Kurt and Bob.

Kurt reviewed the status of WG documents.  The syntaxes and ldapprep 
documents are ready to be advanced to the IESG.  The chairs are seeking 
a new author for the schema document, to finish up a couple of small 
issues and get it to the IESG.  The models, filter, DN, and URL 
documents are all approved by the IESG and waiting in the RFC Editor 
queue.  The BCP64bis and roadmap documents are ready for WG last call.

The strprep document has already been through WG last call, but a couple 
of issues have recently been discussed on the list, in particular 
handling of insignificant spaces in substring matching.  The latest 
draft (draft-ietf-ldapbis-strprep-05.txt) contains Kurt's proposed 
solution to this issue:  to conceptually expand foo[space]bar into 
foo[space space]bar; a rationale is provided in Appendix B of the 
document.  Bob (as co-chair) will assess consensus on this point to try 
to close the issue.  A new topic has to do with handling "failures" in 
string mapping and whether "troublesome" characters should be permitted. 
  The latest draft takes the position that they should not be, and Kurt 
(as editor) believes there is consensus on this point.  Others present 
at the meeting (Jim Sermersheim and Roger Harrison) agree with this 
approach but think more discussion may be necessary.

Jim Sermersheim discussed the protocol document 
(draft-ietf-ldapbis-protocol-30.txt).  There is still some work to 
clarify the use of attributes and subtypes in search filters and search 
selection lists.  There has been discussion of TLS layer removal and the 
effect of changes in TLS ciphersuites.  The general approach is to 
remove from the document prescriptive text that is unnecessarily 
restrictive to implementations.  For example it should not say that a 
client should "drop all PDUs after sending a closure alert", since the 
client may want to process a server close message.

Language will have to be added to cover the security considerations of 
TLS ciphersuite changes.  Kurt suggests that in general security factors 
will change throughout the life of an LDAP session, and that these are 
inputs to client and server policy.  The standard can't prescribe all 
the effects since policies will be deployment-specific.  For example, 
the openldap server is choosing to close a connection when its 
ciphersuite changes.

Jim commented that some cleanup is needed in the document regarding the 
use of "PDU".

Jim will submit a new rev of the document when the WG has come to 
consensus on these remaining points.  The chairs will follow with a 
message to the list confirming that the new rev is OK, and if so will 
return the document to the IESG.

Roger Harrison discussed the authmeth document 
(draft-ietf-ldapbis-authmeth-14.txt).  Changes were made to reflect the 
consensus on terminology for connection/session/etc.  The "association" 
term still has to be removed.  Roger commented that given recent changes 
the state table has been reduced even more, and may be at the point of 
no longer being useful in the document, ie it was useful as a design 
tool but not as documentation.  There was agreement on this point.  In 
discussing handling of SASL-expressed authorization IDs, Kurt said it's 
important to remember that LDAP does not standardize and authorization 
model.

Roger noted that a recently raised issue has to do with clarifying how a 
client should do matching on different types of subjectAltNames in 
certificates presented by servers via TLS.  E.g., matching rules for DNS 
names are different from those for URIs.  The draft RFC 3280bis has 
guidance on this (for its own purposes), so the LDAP document should 
base its language on the same matching specs used there.  Kurt said that 
for example if a DNS name is an IDN, that the rule should be to use the 
toASCII conversion and use the result of that for matching.  Roger also 
noted that the language about authorization factors should be made less 
prescriptive.

Roger hopes to produce a -15 rev by April 8, and that that rev would be 
ready for WG last call.

Kurt reviewed WG milestones.  The key milestone is to deliver the entire 
revised LDAP technical specification to the IESG by April 2005, so this 
means proceeding with last call on authmeth in April, clearing up any 
remaining issues with other docs, and issuing a last call for the 
roadmap document in April.  BCP64bis can be WGLC'd in May, and that 
would conclude outstanding items for the WG.

Kurt noted that a Paris meeting, if held, would likely consider new work.

The meeting was concluded at 1620.