Subject: Re: AW: [Sipping] FYI: RADIUS & SIP

From: Jiri Kuthan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2003 18:00:08 +0200

Thanks, I very much agree; we have received identical feedback so far.

-jiri

At 08:12 PM 7/29/2003, Jonathan Rosenberg wrote:
>I know of several carriers with RADIUS infrastructures that want to use them to support SIP. They are currently using expired I-Ds and proprietary attributes. As a result, I would strongly advocate work on standardizing RADIUS usage with SIP.
>
>There are two areas of work that I see a need for:
>
>1. Digest authentication. The sterman draft (http://www.freeradius.org/radiusd/doc/rfc/draft-sterman-aaa-sip-00.txt) is used quite a bit, it seems. It would be nice to standardize on this.
>
>2. Prepaid calling. Many folks are using vendor proprietary radius extensiosn to support prepaid calling. It would be nice to bring those  forward and standardize on them.
>
>-Jonathan R.
>
>Bernard Aboba wrote:
>
>>Is there some particular set of draft(s) that you are advocating work on?
>>On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Liess, Laura wrote:
>>
>>>I think most carriers currently use some kind of RADIUS platform to do user authentication and they would like to reuse it in the future to authenticate their SIP customers.
>>>My colleagues who are responsible for the RADIUS Platform of the Deutsche Telekom (CC)are currently on vacation so I could not check with them now about how to answer this mail, but we already talked about this issue a number of times and my strong opinion is that "yes, Deutsche Telekom cares a lot about SIP and RADIUS". Reusing the existing RADIUS platform for SIP authentication is a strong requirement for the development of SIP services within the Deutsche Telekom.
>>>
>>>Laura (T-Systems/Deutsche Telekom Group)
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Sipping mailing list  https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/sipping
>>This list is for NEW development of the application of SIP
>>Use [email-masked] for questions on current sip
>>Use [email-masked] for new developments of core SIP
>
>-- 
>Jonathan D. Rosenberg, Ph.D.                600 Lanidex Plaza
>Chief Technology Officer                    Parsippany, NJ 07054-2711
>dynamicsoft
>[email-masked]                     FAX:   (973) 952-5050
>http://www.jdrosen.net                      PHONE: (973) 952-5000
>http://www.dynamicsoft.com
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Sipping mailing list  https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/sipping
>This list is for NEW development of the application of SIP
>Use [email-masked] for questions on current sip
>Use [email-masked] for new developments of core SIP

_______________________________________________
Sipping mailing list  https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/sipping
This list is for NEW development of the application of SIP
Use [email-masked] for questions on current sip
Use [email-masked] for new developments of core SIP

---

From: Jiri Kuthan <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2003 19:02:07 +0200

At 06:34 PM 8/5/2003, Bernard Aboba wrote:
>Everyone seems to be in agreement on the required work (am I dreaming, or
>is this really the IETF?)

:)

>There has been some discussion of potentially forming a WG to
>handle RADIUS-related work (RADIUSEXT?).  The question is whether
>SIP-specific items (such as the Sterman draft and the SIP accounting work)
>would be appropriate for a new RADIUS-focussed WG, or whether it might be
>more appropriate for a SIP-focussed group (such as SIPPING).

My esthetical process preference is to create specific extensions in the
WG which is involved with the specifics; SIPPING in this particular case.

-Jiri

---

From: Allison Mankin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2003 10:19:13 -0700

>more appropriate for a SIP-focussed group (such as SIPPING).

I believe  they'd be more appropriate developed in SIPPING,
with cross-review from the RADIUS group.  But I think SIPPING needs some
information on what the RADIUS working group-to-be is expected to do on RADIUS, 
in what timeframe.  From what I've understood, the charter would not primarily
be applications.  Could you give us more understanding?

Allison

---

From: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2003 09:34:56 -0700 (PDT)

Any opinions?

---

From: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2003 10:11:09 -0700 (PDT)

> be applications.  Could you give us more understanding?

Here is a summary of the discussion so far:

Basic RADIUS work

Since RADIUS is running out of attribute space, it was suggested that a
basic attribute extension mechanism (such as one using the reserved
vendorid of 0) be added.

This item could be handled in a 1-2 page document so it should have a
short timeframe (~6 months).

There is interest in specifying how RADIUS handles prepaid accounting.
Requests for this are coming from the SIP community as well as 3GPP2
and folks interested in WLAN prepaid:

http://www.watersprings.org/pub/id/draft-lior-radius-prepaid-extensions-01.txt

My understanding is that 3GPP2 intends to include this in a forthcoming
standard so that the timeframe needs to be set to meet their needs.

In order to address concerns about RADIUS transport behavior and
accounting reliability, there has been interest expressed on a draft on
RADIUS transport behavior. This would presumably address some of the more
egregious problems encountered with existing implementations (such as
lack of backoff or jittering) as well as describing how RADIUS might be
made to work more reliably:

http://www.watersprings.org/pub/id/draft-lior-radius-reliable-accounting-00.txt

Without some fundamental changes to RADIUS (such as addition of
a heartbeat), it is not clear that it will be possible to specify a
demonstrably correct failover algorithm in addition to handling basic
transport response issues (e.g. backoff, jittering, RTT estimation, etc.).

So there is some question about the scope of a potential transport
document (e.g. just basic retransmission behavior or retransmssion +
failover).  On the face of it, it seems that it would require a lot of
changes to make RADIUS as reliable as Diameter:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3539.txt

The timeframe of this work could be short (~9 months) assuming that the
scope is containable.

WLAN-related

A number of different organizations (WFA, IEEE, etc.) have been specifying
WLAN-related attributes.  There appears to be interest in standardizing
the most useful ones.  This and some other WLAN-related work is described
here:

http://www.watersprings.org/pub/id/draft-adrangi-radius-issues-in-pwlan-roaming-00.txt

The timeframe for this is hard to estimate, but I'd guess it is ~18 months
or so.

We also had a request from the IEEE 802.11 Liason, Dorothy Stanley, for
work on fast handoff.  Bill Arbaugh at the University of Maryland is
implementing the draft below:

http://www.watersprings.org/pub/id/draft-irtf-aaaarch-handoff-02.txt

However, Bill has requested that this work not be considered as an IETF WG
work item until his research is complete and the usefulness of the
proposed extension can be evaluated.

---

From: Henry Sinnreich <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 17:54:31 -0500

Bernard, you have got it right:

1. Sterman draft on digest authentication w/RADIUS.
2. Draft on RADIUS accounting w/SIP.
3. RADIUS Prepaid accounting support.
4. Document on RADIUS transport behavior, to support (2).

Also, his is an excellent overview of RADIUS. Many of us work however in
organizations that either sell/deploy web services and/or actively develop
it. How can we get a handle on web services when comparing the options?
(This means I am unfortunately not volunteering)

BTW: My observations are the same as Jiri's: Nobody has asked for DIAMETER,
and all are asking for RADIUS.

Thanks, Henry

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
> Bernard Aboba
> Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 12:11 PM
> To: Allison Mankin
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: AW: [Sipping] FYI: RADIUS & SIP
>