IETF Work Groups Press Ahead on Location Privacy, 911, IPv6
Working-group leaders reported progress on privacy and location, emergency communications and IPv6 specifications, in discussions at an international meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force in San Francisco. The conclusions of working group sessions at the meeting all last week are subject to broader discussion on its e-mail list and then approval by the Internet Engineering Steering Group. The open, volunteer organization runs by so-called rough consensus: Action requires the support of the great majority of those taking part.
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The working group on geographic location and privacy has created a set of protocols for sending privacy-protection information with data on a user’s location, said co-chair Alissa Cooper. She’s chief computer scientist of the Center for Democracy & Technology. Work has been completed on requirements, data formats and the language for expressing policy information, she said. The group is close to finishing work on HTTP Enabled Location Delivery protocols for configuring Internet end points, she said. It decided to maintain backward compatibility with an older standard, a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol option, by fixing problems with it, rather replace it, Cooper said.
The working group on emergency communications resolution with Internet technologies is “finishing documents on [its] chartered goals of producing specifications covering IP devices calling emergency services (9-1-1, 1-1-2),” said co- chair Marc Linsner of Cisco. “The protocol documents are complete, [and] the only remaining items are finishing the framework and best current practice documents. This meeting was targeted at getting consensus around those last two documents. There is a request from part of the community to add applicability statements as the last task. This is under review by the group ... It is the chair’s desire to have the last remaining discussion item complete within a few weeks. We are also currently reviewing additions to the charter, like PSAP callback and will decide about these after our current charter items are complete.”
The group on behavior engineering for hindrance avoidance -- BEHAVE -- “decided to create new milestones and accept new documents for several IPv6/IPv4 translation scenarios,” co-chair Dan Wing of Cisco said by e-mail. “It was decided that all six scenarios are necessary ... The six are the ones that are solvable.” There are two other situations, he said, but IPv4 Internet to IPv6 Internet is “not solvable for technical reasons,” and “nobody would want to operate an Internet-wide IPv6 [to] IPv4 translator -- there is no money to be made!”
Separately, the working group on IPv6 operations concluded that the UPnP Forum “should consider more secure alternatives” in its next-generation firewall-interface specification to the “unauthenticated mode” that UPnP runs in now, said Cisco’s Fred Baker, co-chair. The current situation “is comparable to locking the door to one’s house, but taping the key to the lock with a note asking that only one’s friends use it,” he said.
A discussion of “CPE router requirements took some steps forward, with discussions among large networks, vendors, CableLabs, and the Broadband Forum,” Baker said. “The Working Group expects to give advice to vendors of residential and SOHO router products as to what features are important for IPv6 support, especially given current IPv4/IPv6 coexistence and transition issues.”
And “Cisco presented some observations regarding IPv6 operation at a conference they put on for their customers,” Baker said. “Detailed discussion is http://www.cisconetworkers6.com. In summary, however, Cisco reported that when they enabled IPv6 service, and especially after opening IPv6 access to Google’s search engine, IPv6 usage was very evident. Typically, the users in question were unaware that they were using IPv6, and reported no issues with it apart from the fact that Cisco’s portal that enabled them to use the network was not IPv6-enabled.”