[AG-TECH] AG Security

Markus Buchhorn Markus.Buchhorn at anu.edu.au
Mon Jul 22 19:59:58 CDT 2002


At 04:12 AM 22/07/2002 +0100, Robert Olson wrote:

>>I quite like Jay's comments on the spatial metaphor for venues, and Ivan's query on what a venue should or should not provide. Having a spatial metaphor to get into a venue probably isn't important (as Shawn noted),
>
>Hm. It may not be important when there are only a few venues; however, as the number of venues and sites hosting venues grows, I suspect that some mechanism for managing and navigating the topology will become more important. 

 ...very good point....

>I've been tracking the SRTP stuff, but haven't been watching the other groups yet. Do you have a feel for how far away from available implementations the SMUG and MSEC folks are? 

No, sorry. I haven't tracked them (I'm on enough lists!), but will start to do a more serious search into it - especially as we get closer to bringing up our nodes.

>As an aside, I don't see that the wide/narrow bandwidth issue is necessarily a security matter; it seems roughly equivalent to the problem where I could run an ADSM backup of my laptop over the wireless shownet here at Edinburgh 

It's an access issue, which has AAA overtones, so it overlaps with security in some aspects. It has a technological solution - but nobody's come up with yet. It is distinct from "normal" security, in that you're not interested in protecting the content, but you want to protect your links from Joe Student connecting over the college DSL line to a 100 source multicast of HDTV demonstrators. You can set tunnels/choke points for multicast (and backups), but that defeats the purpose - if the same Joe Student wants to access NASA TV over multicast at 1Mb/s he (probably) should be allowed to (if the network can handle it). So how do you tell the user/client and the network how much traffic to expect for an arbitrary multicast group? A TCP-based non-realtime transfer (backups, ftp, www) can be much more reasonably (in a political sense) controlled. Of course, how do you stay reasonable when 1000 Joe Students all want to do "reasonable-traffic" multicast.... :-)

Cheers,
        Markus


Markus Buchhorn, ANU Internet Futures Project,        | Ph: +61 2 61258810
Markus.Buchhorn at anu.edu.au, mail: Bldg #108 - CS&IT   |Fax: +61 2 61259805
Australian National University, Canberra 0200, Aust.  |Mobile: 0417 281429




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