Minutes: XRI TC Telecon 2-3PM PT Thursday 2009-10-29

Following are the minutes of the unofficial telecon of the XRI TC
at:

Date:  Thursday, 29 October 2009 USA

Time:  2:00PM - 3:00PM Pacific Time (21:00-22:00 UTC)

ATTENDING

 

John Bradley

Will Norris

Bob Morgan 

Peter Davis

Scott Cantor

Drummond Reed

Nat Sakimura 

George Fletcher 

Eran Hammer-Lahav

AGENDA

1) CORRECTIONS FOR COMMITTEE DRAFT 01 FOR PUBLIC REVIEW

We went over the list of requested corrections from TC Admin Mary McRae:

  http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/xri/200910/msg00090.html

 

Most of these are controlled by the XSLT style sheet. Will is
working with what he believes in a newer version of the style sheet but needs
to clarify this with Mary. He noted that even this new style sheet still
continues to generate italized vs. ALL CAPS for normative words.

 

We also discussed the acknowlegement section and Mary’s feedback
there. Drummond will check with Mary about whether we can add a paragraph at
the very end with non-TC acknowledgements.

2) POLICY EXPRESSION AND XRD

Drummond said that several folks have asked him whether XRD could be used for
describing the security policy for a relying party website for use with
identity protocols like OpenID and Information Cards. George pointed out that
the UMA work at Kantara is also using XRD for discovery of various related
resources.

 

There was consensus that the current design of XRD is not as a
policy expression language, but that discovery of the types of protocols an RP
supports, and the location of policy expression documents, is definitely in
scope. So it is fine to have the XRD point to another document that describes the
security policy of the site. This other document may be protocol-specific or
protocol-independent as needed.

 

The question of how valuable it is to embed policy expression
directly in the XRD to avoid additional roundtrips is debatable. Especially for
very large metadata files (e.g., SAML metadata in some cases), it would not
make sense, however for small metadata files it could. For example, Peter
explained that some time back he had published a proposal for how to publish a
SAML entity descriptor inside an XRD.

 

Eran suggests the rule of thumb is, “If XRD can describe it,
great, otherwise link to it.”

 

3) LRDD AND HOST-META

 

Eran has published new LRDD and host-meta drafts and encourages
feedback both within the TC and at Internet Identity Workshop (IIW). With regard
to LRDD, it now has three simple “selection profiles”: Host-priority,
Resource-priority, Equal-priority. So anyone using LRDD will need to specify:
a) the relation type they are using, and b) the priority profile you are using.

 

Drummond said he’s planning to hold a session at IIW on XRD and
XRI Resolution 3.0 and would like take advantage of Eran’s and other’s thinking
about best practices for using XRD in this specific context.

 

John asked Eran about use of host-meta by different protocols –
can one host-meta work for all of them (e.g., http: and https:)? There are two
basic options: a) declare that there is only one host-meta for the host – that
is available via either http: or https:, or b) make it possible for host-meta
to cover only specific protocols on specific ports.

 

Will put it this way: “Is host-meta about the host, or it is
about a set of resources?” John said his definition of “host” is “the subject
of an SSL certificate”. Eran pointed out that a pure host – as opposed to a
host:port combination, is very hard to define.

 

We ran out of time to further discuss it on the call but there
was agreement this will make a good session for next week at IIW.

4) XRI SYNTAX 3.0 WORKING DRAFT 03

Drummond is nearly compete and plans to publish it before IIW. There is one question
about relative XRIs but he will note that within this working draft.

5) NEXT CALL

There will be NO CALL next week due to IIW. The next call will be in two weeks.