Actually, I think the form John proposed is good.  I don't think some redundant state returned is an issue if it simplifies the protocol, and it could be very useful for debugging things like state machine problems or for possible recovery processes when an NSA has been offline.

My only concern is that we preserve the authorization aspects.   Specifically, as I see it, there are/should be only two levels of information regarding any connection instance:    a) "summary information" that reflects user specified constraints and which the user/requester is entitled to know, and b) "detail information" that the provider defines and the provider is entitled to control or limit.  

The PA should have the option to keep detail info private - or to expose those details selectively to agents it trusts (for example authorized monitor agents)    I think the detail information is a super set of the summary information.   Thus a authorized detail query should be able to include summary information.  

So, a Detailed query processing would check authorization as follows at each NSA:   If the request presents authorized high level credentials and depth is greater or equal to zero, the local detail info is releaseed and formatted.   If depth is non-zero, the depth is decremented and a detailed query is sent to the children and the childrens' responses are formatted for release.   The request returns upward.     If the credentials fail high level auth, they are checked against low level authorization,  if they pass low level authorization then only summary info is released and formatted, no additional recursion occurs, and the request returns up the tree.    If the credentials fail both high and low authorization, the request is rejected and no information is released.   

A Summary request is different than a Detailed request in that only summary information is *ever* returned, thus only a low level authorization check is ever made.  There is no recursion for a summary request.  

Thoughts?
J

On 5/18/12 9:29 AM, Henrik Thostrup Jensen wrote:
On Fri, 18 May 2012, John MacAuley wrote:

Forgot to answer this question.  Yes they could if we are now including the local information.  The
question is does each NSA put in its full connection map, then let the child NSA do the same thing
which will result in duplicate information?

Interesting point. However is this really duplicate information? Each state represents what an NSA things about the state, making this usefull for detecting state skew betwen NSAs.


    Best regards, Henrik

 Henrik Thostrup Jensen <htj at nordu.net>
 Software Developer, NORDUnet 


_______________________________________________
nsi-wg mailing list
nsi-wg@ogf.org
https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/nsi-wg