Team Meeting March 24, 2003 Atlanta Georgia
Attendees:
Samir Chatterjee (via VC) - Claremont Graduate University
Tarun Abhichandani - Claremont Graduate University
Roy Muchtar – RADVISION
Karen Krivaa (via VC) RADVISION
Egon Verharen (via VC) – SURFnet
Henny Bekker (via VC) - SURFnet
Jill Gemmill - University of Alabama at Birmingham
John-Paul Robinson - University of Alabama at Birmingham
Jason Lynn - University of Alabama at Birmingham
Adita Srinivasan - University of Alabama at Birmingham
Tyler Johnson - University of North Carolina
Nadim El-Khoury - University of North Carolina
Summary of Discussion
1. EndPoints and TestBed status
Status of commObject enabled CGU SIP client-
CGU client is working; commObject integration consists of whitepages lookup only. It was stated that the CGUsip Client will need to become fully commObject compliant in the near future for testbed deployment.
Tarun stated that CGU needed to do some MCU testing and asked if they should focus on security or testing at this point. Jill and Tyler said security is much more important.
Tarun asked how they should integrate commObject into an endpoint. Jill said that they should have an intermediate release with just simple authentication; login and password. John-Paul asked if CGUsip Client has command line capabilities. Tarun said no, they do not.
Tarun brought up the notion of commObject enabling the Dynamicsoft proxy. Tyler said that they should focus on commObject enabling the user agent and leave the proxy database in place for the meantime.
Tarun said the Dynamicsoft, that authenticates against a database also has support for authenticating against an LDAP server.
SIP interoperability of the CGU Client. The group felt that the project is not about SIP interoperability and that CGU should focus on other tasks such as full commObject compliance.
Client should have Native LDAP query capability so that it is not dependent on availability of HTML/WEB page – we suggest re-using some Java LDAP browser software
Status of commObject enabled RADVISION H323 client
Some concern was expressed about lack of information about plans for RADVISION prototype h323 endpoint. Roy and Karen will try to get a response from Anatoli very soon.
Client should have Native LDAP query capability so that it is not dependent on availability of HTML/WEB page
Will media be encrypted for either Annex?
Status of commObject GUI management code (discussed below)
Status of commObject enabled ECS Gatekeeper
in process and due shortly
a flow diagram was reviewed
Jill asked Roy if RADVISION is going to encrypt the H.235 messages. Roy was not sure and said that he would check.
Status of SIP/H.323 Gateways
The group spoke briefly about gateways. Tyler suggested that the group continue to focus on RADVISION's gateway.
Summary : all efforts need to focus on WORKING PROOF OF CONCEPT – ie, basic functionality using commObject must work among components.
John-Paul recommended use of command-line interface for testing where possible – focus on internal functionality and avoid hassle of developing GUI to send data to program.
2. H.323 Enterprise Authentication Document
Appreciation was expressed to John-Paul for this contribution. Tyler suggested that the document needs to be more strongly worded as a recommendation and less agnostic. The stages of the document suggest a development roadmap – first, do the easiest case, then implement the next harder case, etc. All agreed the document should be incorporated into the cookbook.
3. Shibboleth
Tyler asked whether HIPAA requirements could be met by Shibboleth because it seemed to be more about institution certificates than individual certificates. John-Paul said that Shibboleth can be as granular as you would like. Jill agreed.
4. commObject and X-Identities
The group would like to see the ITU-T’s response to Nadim’s document from February
sipIdentity will be included in May ITU-T submission
Discussion about Virtual Rooms and multicast applications
Tyler concerned about lack of adoption as general standard
Jill pointed out commObject doesn’t fit multicast/virtual rooms conferencing where rooms come and go and no particular people are associated with these rooms. Egon said the the VRVS people were not against commObject, but that the commObjects would have to be created dynamically.
Jill stated Access Grid people thought ability to look up the AG administrator would be useful
This brought up the question of how the group would implement an MCU in commObject. Jason suggested finding some standardized "Room" object or something similar. It was suggested to look at GRID services and D.M.T.F. (distributed MGT Task Force) for such objects. A standard room schema from Microsoft has been found subsequently.
commIdentity
To accommodate other protocols and virtual rooms, providing at least directory-searchable information stating that the person can be reaching using technology XYZ, we agreed to include a generic “commIdentity” object having only a textfield (in addition to commUniqueID, commPrivate and commOwnerURI) to benefit those protocols not yet included in the standard drafts.
A “helpful message” (eg: “Philippe can be contacted through the VRVS conferencing service http://www.vrvs.org/” )
The cookbook should explain how to create a new schema for any new protocol.
How to extend h323/SIP Identity
For example: an instant messaging service
Unique naming issue – does the commObject have a Distinguished Name (DN)? We all agree that the only attribute GUARANTEED to be unique in commObject is commUniqueID – if you happened to use this value for h323Identity you’d have some hope of returning a single commObject. Email addresses are unique, but one person could have the same email address in multiple commObjects. RADVISION has an algorithm requiring that for example, 3 out of 4 or 3 out of 5 names/aliases match to help identify which endpoint is contacting the gatekeeper. We left this as an implementation issue, but thought it might be worth discussing in the cookbook.
Roy asked if we needed a gatekeeper list in commObject. Tyler answered that the functionality is already available with the multivalued GKDomain attribute. This way you have a choice in the endpoint to choose a gatekeeper. Egon suggested that we support profiles, as seen in Netscape. Tyler said this is also possible now, but that it is strictly up to the endpoint to implement.
The focus then shifted to digital certificates. John-Paul asked how and where does the endpoint get its private key. Tyler asked if the group needed to add an attribute for this. Roy said RADVISION was not yet very familiar with Annex E. (Jill has done some subsequent reading – there is no specification of where the private key comes from; for a “standard” long-term certificate (eg from Verisign) you download the private key from the vendor’s web site. KX.509 is unusual in that the private key is generated at the client).
We should aim for an ITU-T h235 Annex E (or F) Profile submission, using temporarily issued certs, - first version in fall 2003.
5. Distributed Search
Here we were greatly aided by Henny, Egon and the discussion regarding CIP (Common Indexing Protocol) which is already in use in Europe. See
http://www.surfnet.nl/innovatie/surf-ace/search/ldap/d2_ldap_tio/
for the functional design of the Desire LDAP/TIO-Index server.
CIP uses an ldap prober (Pull model) : point made that any directories like UAB’s that limit results to 25 or 50 could not be searched this way
Uses TIO index server (a central server that returns a pointer to the information source)
LIMS is an example of a TIO server
CIP can also work by sending a TIO index to the central server (PUSH model)
Some decisions need to be made about what attributes to index
We realized that a slight modification to existing TIO code would be needed in order to follow either commURI or commOwnerURI links. Henny will look into that. At a minimum the group decided that both commObject and people directories could be crawled.
Egon needs a list of commObject and people servers to be crawled; we suggested
NWU
UNC global directory
CGU
UAB
SURFnet
Egon will set up and config the Directory of Directories
We may want to add the address of the ldap server to the zone record.
6. Additional Cookbok/TestBed Discussion:
The cookbook should include Aditya’s code for configuring endpoint via commObject
The cookbook should include Aditya’s code for native LDAP search & retrieval
7. Deliverables List, Responsibilities and Dates attached
8. Next Face to Face Meeting in OCTOBER 2003