Subject: Protocol Action: COPS Usage for Policy Provisioning to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2001 09:23:27 -0800

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'COPS Usage for Policy
Provisioning' <draft-ietf-rap-pr-05.txt> as a Proposed Standard.  This
document is the product of the Resource Allocation Protocol Working
Group.  The IESG contact persons are Bert Wijnen and Randy Bush.

Technical Summary
 
  This document describes the use of the COPS protocol [COPS] for
  support of policy provisioning (COPS-PR).  This specification is
  independent of the type of policy being provisioned (QoS,
  Security, etc.), but rather focuses on the mechanisms and
  conventions used to communicate provisioned information between
  PDPs and PEPs.  The protocol extensions described in this
  document do not make assumptions about the policy data model
  being communicated, but describe the message formats and objects
  that carry the modeled policy data.

Working Group Summary

  The RAP WG has consensus on publication of this document as a
  Proposed Standard.

Protocol Quality

  The specification has been reviewed for the IESG by Bert Wijnen.

Notes to RFC-Editor:

1.Please in section 1.1, remove the last 2 paragraphs.
   So section 1.1 should read:

  1.1. Why COPS for Provisioning?

   COPS-PR has been designed within a framework that is optimized for
   efficiently provisioning policies across devices, based on the
   requirements defined in [RAP]. First, COPS-PR allows for efficient
   transport of attributes, large atomic transactions of data, and
   efficient and flexible error reporting. Second, as it has a single
   connection between the policy client and server per area of policy
   control identified by a COPS Client-Type, it guarantees only one
   server updates a particular policy configuration at any given
   time. Such a policy configuration is effectively locked, even from
   local console configuration, while the PEP is connected to a PDP
   via COPS. COPS uses reliable TCP transport and, thus, uses a state
   sharing/synchronization mechanism and exchanges differential
   updates only. If either the server or client are rebooted (or
   restarted) the other would know about it quickly. Last, it is
   defined as a real-time event-driven communications mechanism,
   never requiring polling between the PEP and PDP.

2.Pls replace the security section with this text:

  8. Security Considerations

 The COPS protocol [COPS], from which this document derives, describes the
 mandatory security mechanisms that MUST be supported by all COPS
 implementations. These mandatory security mechanisms are used by the COPS
 protocol to transfer opaque information from PEP to PDP and vice versa in an
 authenticated and secure manner. COPS for Policy Provisioning simply defines
 a structure for this opaque information already carried by the COPS
 protocol. As such, the security mechanisms described for the COPS protocol
 will also be deployed in a COPS-PR environment, thereby ensuring the
 integrity of the COPS-PR information being communicated. Furthermore, in
 order to fully describe a practical set of structured data for use with
 COPS-PR, a PIB (Policy Information Base) will likely be written in a
 separate document. The authors of such a PIB document need to be aware of
 the security concerns associated with the specific data they have defined.
 These concerns MUST be fully specified in the security considerations
 section of the PIB document along with the required security mechanisms for
 transporting this newly defined data.