Subject: RFC 2284bis issues

From: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 22:36:55 -0800 (PST)

Sorry about mistyping the URL for the RFC 2284bis document. It is at:

http://www.drizzle.com/~aboba/AAA/draft-ietf-pppext-rfc2284bis-02.txt

There are a few issues discussed there (and on the EAP mailing list) that
might be relevant to PANA. 

One issue is clarification of EAP requirements on lower layers. In the
PANA charter, it states that EAP makes certain assumptions about PPP link
layers. RFC 2284bis tries to better define and to some extent relax some
of those assumptions. 

For example, EAP is now run on media which are *not* point to point, such
as wireless 802.11. This has implications for security in particular which
we are trying to address in RFC 2284bis. 

Link layer success/failure indications. These indications are not
uniform between link layers. For example, PPP provides alternate
success/failure indications (LCP terminate for failure and NCP for
success). However, IEEE 802.11 only provides an alternate failure
indication (Disassociation), as does wired 802 (link down). 

RFC 2284bis attempts to further clarify and in some cases remove
dependencies on link layer indications. 

In a future revision, the document will attempt to define a state machine
that clarifies how the protocol is supposed to behave in various
circumstances, including reauthentication. 

We will also be revising RFC 2869, which has some issues with respect to
the attributes that may be carried within the AAA messages that
constitute (and terminate) an EAP exchange. 

A further document, draft-aboba-pppext-key-problem-01.txt provides
details on the nature of the "keys" provided by EAP methods, and the
requirements for EAP methods deriving keys.