Dear all,
my name is Ralph Niederberger. I am one of the chairs of the FVGA-WG at
OGF. We are currently investigating in designing a new protocol for
dynamic opening of ports within firewalls by authorized user applications.
Sorry for crossposting to security-area and infrastructure-area, but I would
like to get feedback from all of you concerning a draft protocol we are
just
preparing within our group.
The draft description I have appended to this email.
It would be very helpful, if you could comment on this proposal, so that the
Firewall Virtualisation for Grid Applications - Work Group can work on
your comments at the next OGF meeting.
We know that there are many other developments, which already have tried to
solve this issue, but have not seen any solution, which is widely used
and/or
provides a similar easy to use interface and broad range of usability.
Our intention is to get as much as possible feedback, so that we can
decide as
soon as possible, if the direction we are going is the right one or if
we have missed
anything important.
Dependent on your feedback, we would like to go for this solution or
change the
draft accordingly.
Then we would like to start the following steps in parallel:
a.) Getting in touch with IETF for standardization issues.
b.) Implementation of a first very limited prototype (showing that it
works as suggested).
Step b could be separated into different parts:
b1.) prototype implementation for linux iptables
b2.) prototype in close cooperation with a Firewall developer (-> a
first FiTP aware firewall).
Anyone having contact to these guys would be fine.
b3.) Communication prototypes for out of band signalling, i.e. for
firewalls which are FiTP
unaware. So the auth server has to start a subroutine for firewall
configuration (via CLI,
special firewall managament software, https, ...)
b3 could be done for several firewall systems, e.g. Cisco Pix,
Checkpoint, ...
Here we would need experts having access to those kinds of
firewalls within test environments.
Next steps are very dependent on the outcome of steps a.) and b.) above.
I would like to thank you all in advance for your feedback.
best regards
Ralph Niederberger
--
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Ralph Niederberger
Juelich Supercomputing Centre
Institute for Advanced Simulation
Phone: +49 2461 61-4772
Fax: +49 2461 61-6656
E-Mail: r.niederberger(a)fz-juelich.de
WWW: http://www.fz-juelich.de/jsc/
JSC is the coordinator of the
John von Neumann Institute for Computing
and member of the
Gauss Centre for Supercomputing
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Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH
52425 Jülich
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Jülich
Eingetragen im Handelsregister des Amtsgerichts Düren Nr. HR B 3498
Vorsitzende des Aufsichtsrats: MinDirig'in Bärbel Brumme-Bothe
Geschäftsführung: Prof. Dr. Achim Bachem (Vorsitzender),
Dr. Ulrich Krafft (stellv. Vorsitzender), Prof. Dr. Harald Bolt,
Dr. Sebastian M. Schmidt
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