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- CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_
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- Reported by Dave Borman/Cray Research, Inc.
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- MINUTES
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- The TELNET working group meeting got off to a slow start, but gained
- momentum as the meeting went on. The following are the highlights from
- the meeting, in the order which they were discussed.
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- Assigned Numbers:
-
- Joyce Reynolds brought up that a new assigned numbers document will be
- issued in six to eight weeks. This document contains a list of all the
- TELNET options, and their current status. This list needs to be
- updated.
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- ACTION: Dave Borman will send out the proposed list for comments, update
- the list as necessary, and forward it to Joyce.
-
- Dan Bernsteins Q Method of Option loop avoidance:
-
- Joyce also said that she and Jon Postel have decided to publish Dan
- Bernsteins Q method of option negotiation loop avoidance. Since the
- TELNET working group does not agree with all the technical points of
- this method, the working group needs to decide if it wants to issue a
- discussion RFC commenting on the Q method, or whether the group want to
- just ignore the issue for now, waiting for the revised TELNET spec to
- comment/clarify about option negotiation loop avoidance. No decision
- was made.
-
- Re-Issuing the TELNET RFC:
-
- It was decided that the TELNET RFC will need to be updated and
- re-issued. The reason for this decision was that there are several
- areas that need to be addressed, among them are: 8 bit NVT support,
- option negotiation loop avoidance, and DO/WONT vs DO/WONT/DONT option
- negotiation. The status section will also need to be redone to conform
- to the current standards for the status section.
-
- Review of proposed options:
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- DONT-TELNET option:
- Since Bill Westfield, the author, was not in attendance, the discussion
- was tabled until the next meeting.
-
- ENVIRONMENT option:
- The option, with revisions agreed upon at the last meeting, was
- discussed. It was decided that an INFO command, identical to the IS
- command, was needed. The IS is only sent in response to a SEND command,
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- and an INOF can be sent spontaneously to indicate changes. The INFO is
- not to be use to indicate initial state; that is what the SEND/IS is
- for.
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- ACTION: Dave Borman will write up a new draft for review. It is hoped
- that by the next meeting it will be ready for RFC submission.
-
- COMPRESSION option:
- This option was reviewed in light of the comments from the mailing list.
- It was decided that: 1) this is a non-trivial option to define. 2) No
- one in attendance had a burning desire to have this option. Therefor,
- it was decided that this option will be put at the bottom of the list of
- things to do, unless someone else is willing to become a champion for
- this option.
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- AUTHENTICATION/ENCRYPTION options:
- Midway through the meeting, Steve Crocker joined the group. Steve is
- the Security Area Director for the IETF. Since most of the people at the
- meeting were not security type people, and Steve is not a TELNET person,
- we spent some time telling Steve about what we were doing, and he spent
- some time telling us about security things.
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- Steve brought up some good points. Since we are not doing any key
- passing through TELNET, we could just as well do the decision about what
- type of encryption/authentication is being used out-of-band from TELNET.
- Then, these options just become a way to turn the stuff on/off, and not
- a negotiation about what form of encryption/authentication is to be
- used.
-
- One fear that Steve brought up is that without having people who know
- about security designing/reviewing the options, there is a good chance
- that what is designed will not be useful. He also brought up that the
- privacy enhanced mail group has been thinking about ftp as its next
- step. Could their work be applied to TELNET also? Should our work be
- applied to FTP?
-
- From the discussion, it was decided that to really be able to hammer out
- the solutions, we needed to get the security people and the TELNET
- people together. Several action items came out of this:
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- ACTION: Steve Crocker will be scheduling a joint security/TELNET meeting
- at the next IETF. This meeting will probably also be talking about FTP.
-
- ACTION: Dave Borman will write up a short paper describing the
- motivation behind wanting the AUTHENTICATION and ENCRYPTION options.
- This would be something that the security people could look over before
- the next IETF meeting to help them understand why the TELNET working
- group is addressing these issues, and what the desired goal is. (Our
- goal is to avoid having clear-text passwords being sent over the
- Internet, and to obsolete rlogin.)
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- ATTENDEES
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- Dave Borman dab@cray.com
- Steve Crocker crocker@tis.com
- Louis A. Mamakos louie@trantor.umd.edu
- Greg Minshall minshall@kinetics.com
- Joyce Reynolds jkrey@isi.edu
- Keith Sklower sklower@okeeffe.Berkeley.Edu
- Allen Sturtevant sturtevant@ccc.nmfecc.gov
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