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 -- *************************************************** Ralph Niederberger Juelich Supercomputing Centre Institute for Advanced Simulation Phone: +49 2461 61-4772 Fax: +49 2461 61-6656 E-Mail: r.niederberger@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 *************************************************** 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 ***************************************************