DECEMBER '94: Object/Document Security BOF

[Eric Blossom <eb@comsec.com>]

Group Name: Object/Document Security BOF (ios)
IETF Area : Security Area
Date/Time : Wednesday, December 7, 1994
            0930-1200

===============

The purpose of this BOF is to present information and to discuss ideas
associated with document/object security, store and forward security,
and third-party security services.  The general idea of creating
protected objects (e.g. signed documents, encrypted files) which
can be accessed and transferred by a variety of applications is
being discussed in several contexts - store and forward extensions
to GSSAPI, PEM-MIME work, www security, etc.

We would like to discuss requirements and constraints for a 
general capability for protected objects and explore the need
for a common approach to providing these types of services.

The BOF is scheduled for 9:30am Wednedsay December 7th. The IOS
(Information Object Security) BOF is within the Security Directorate.
If you're interested in this area, we hope you can attend.

We are planning to present some of our ideas on the requirements and
goals for general protected objects as well as details on an
Information Object Security project BBN is currently working on for
ARPA (short summary below).  This project has developed security tools
for protection of documents and objects as well as for invoking and
performing trusted third party services.

We're looking for anyone else who would like agenda time to either
present specific work/ideas or to discuss requirements and other
contexts for protected objects.  If you'd like to volunteer either
send a message to jlowry@bbn.com or just show up and we can sort out
the agenda there.

Finally there will be a discussion to determine whether there is
interest in continuing.  Should a mailing-list be formed ?  Is there
enough interest and focus to attempt creation of a working group
charter ?  After the BOF, we're prepared to demonstrate prototype IOS
tools for any interested parties.

********
IOS Project

These tools allow the users to apply multiple parallel and
sequential signatures and annotations to objects/documents, and to
provide access control and confidentiality protections to these
objects/documents.

There are a number of utilities available to perform certificate
validation and maintain a cache of certificates.  Included in the
tool set is an ASN.1 to C++ compiler.

Third-party services are also under investigation and the issues
of a trusted time-stamp server, third-party involvement in
non-repudiation, and proof of delivery, submission, and receipt
are addressed.

Documents describing the IOS project tools and architecture are
available for anonymous ftp from the server ftp.bbn.com in the
directory /pub/outgoing/ios_docs.