Policy Framework Working Group J. Strassner
Internet-draft Cisco Systems
Category: Standards Track E. Ellesson
B. Moore
IBM Corporation
Ryan Moats
AT&T
November 1999
Policy Framework LDAP Core Schema
draft-ietf-policy-core-schema-06.txt
November 04, 1999 13:59
Status of this Memo
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
This document takes as its starting point the object-oriented
information model for representing policy information currently under
joint development in the Service Level Agreements (SLA) Policy working
group of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and in the
IETF's Policy Framework working group. The IETF document defining
this information model is the "Policy Framework Core Information
Model" [10]. This model defines two hierarchies of object classes:
structural classes representing policy information and control of
policies, and relationship classes that indicate how instances of the
structural classes are related to each other. In general, both of
these class hierarchies will need to be mapped to a particular data
store.
This draft defines the mapping of these information model classes to a
directory that uses LDAPv3 as its access protocol. When mapping to an
LDAP schema, the structural classes can be mapped more or less
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directly. The relationship hierarchy, however, must be mapped to a
form suitable for directory implementation. Since this mapping of the
relationship classes could be done in a number of different ways,
there is the risk of non-interoperable implementations. To avoid this
possibility, this document provides a single mapping that all
implementations using an LDAP directory as their policy repository
SHALL use.
Classes are also added to the LDAP schema to improve the performance
of a client's interactions with an LDAP server when the client is
retrieving large amounts of policy-related information. These classes
exist only to optimize LDAP retrievals: there are no classes in the
information model that correspond to them.
The LDAP schema described in this document consists of six very
general classes: policy (an abstract class), policyGroup, policyRule,
policyConditionAuxClass, policyTimePeriodConditionAuxClass, and
policyActionAuxClass. The schema also contains two less general
classes: vendorPolicyConditionAuxClass and
vendorPolicyActionAuxClass. To achieve the mapping of the information
model's relationships, the schema contains two auxiliary classes:
policyGroupContainmentAuxClass and policyRuleContainmentAuxClass.
Capturing the distinction between rule-specific and reusable policy
conditions and policy actions introduces five other classes:
policyRuleConditionAssociation, policyRuleActionAssociation,
policyConditionInstance, policyActionInstance, and policyRepository.
Finally, the schema includes two classes policySubtreesPtrAuxClass and
policyElementAuxClass for optimizing LDAP retrievals. In all,
therefore, the schema contains 17 classes.
Within the context of this document, the term "Core [Policy] Schema"
is used to refer to the LDAP class definitions it contains.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction......................................................3
2. The Policy Core Information Model.................................5
3. Inheritance Hierarchy for the LDAP Core Policy Schema.............5
4. General Discussion of Mapping the Information Model to LDAP.......6
4.1. Summary of Class and Relationship Mappings...................7
4.2. Naming Attributes in the Core Schema.........................9
4.3. Rule-Specific and Reusable Conditions and Actions...........10
4.4. Condition Subjects and Targets..............................12
4.5. Location and Retrieval of Policy Objects in the Directory...14
4.5.1. Aliases and Other DIT-Optimization Techniques.............17
5. Class Definitions................................................18
5.1. The Abstract Class "policy".................................18
5.2. The Class policyGroup.......................................19
5.3. The Class policyRule........................................21
5.4. The Class policyRuleConditionAssociation....................24
5.5. The Class policyRuleActionAssociation.......................26
5.6. The Auxiliary Class policyConditionAuxClass.................28
5.7. The Auxiliary Class policyTimePeriodConditionAuxClass.......29
5.8. The Auxiliary Class vendorPolicyConditionAuxClass...........30
5.9. The Auxiliary Class policyActionAuxClass....................31
5.10. The Auxiliary Class vendorPolicyActionAuxClass.............31
5.11. The Class policyConditionInstance..........................32
5.12. The Class policyActionInstance.............................33
5.13. The Auxiliary Class policyElementAuxClass..................35
5.14. The Class policyRepository.................................35
5.15. The Auxiliary Class policySubtreesPtrAuxClass..............37
5.15.1. The Attribute policySubtreesAuxContainedSet..............38
5.16. The Auxiliary Class policyGroupContainmentAuxClass.........38
5.16.1. The Attribute policyGroupsAuxContainedSet................39
5.17. The Auxiliary Class policyRuleContainmentAuxClass..........39
5.17.1. The Attribute policyRulesAuxContainedSet.................40
6. Extending the Core Schema........................................40
6.1. Subclassing policyCondition and policyAction................40
6.2. Using the Vendor Policy Encoding Attributes.................40
6.3. Using Time Validity Periods.................................41
7. Security Considerations..........................................41
8. Intellectual Property............................................43
9. Acknowledgments..................................................43
10. References......................................................44
11. Authors' Addresses..............................................45
12. Full Copyright Statement........................................45
13. Appendix: Constructing the Value of the cimName Attribute......46
1. Introduction
This document takes as its starting point the object-oriented
information model for representing policy information currently under
joint development in the Service Level Agreements working group of the
Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and in the IETF's Policy
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Framework working group. The IETF document defining this information
model is the "Policy Framework Core Information Model" [10]. This
model defines two hierarchies of object classes: structural classes
representing policy information and control of policies, and
relationship classes that indicate how instances of the structural
classes are related to each other. In general, both of these class
hierarchies will need to be mapped to a particular data store.
This draft defines the mapping of these information model classes to a
directory that uses LDAPv3 as its access protocol. Two types of
mappings are involved:
o For the structural classes in the information model, the mapping is
basically one-for-one: information model classes map to LDAP
classes, information model properties map to LDAP attributes.
o For the relationship classes in the information model, different
mappings are possible. In this document the information model's
relationship classes and their properties are mapped in three ways:
to LDAP auxiliary classes, to attributes representing DN pointers,
and to containment in the Directory Information Tree (DIT).
Implementations that use an LDAP directory as their policy repository
SHALL use the LDAP policy schema defined in this document. The use of
the information model defined in reference [10] as the starting point
enables the schema and the relationship class hierarchy to be
extensible, such that other types of policy repositories, such as
relational databases, can also use this information.
This document fits into the overall framework for representing,
deploying, and managing policies being developed by the Policy
Framework Working Group. The initial work to define this framework is
in reference [1]. Current work appears in references [12] through
[15]. More specifically, this document builds on the core policy
classes first introduced in references [2] and [3]. It also draws on
the work done for the Directory-enabled Networks (DEN) specification,
reference [4]. Work on the DEN specification by the DEN Ad-Hoc
Working Group itself has been completed. Further work to standardize
the models contained in it will be the responsibility of selected
working groups of the Common Information Model (CIM) effort in the
Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). Standardization of the core
policy model in the DMTF is the responsibility of the SLA Policy
working group.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119, reference
[5].
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2. The Policy Core Information Model
This document contains an LDAP schema representing the Policy Core
Information Model, which is defined in the companion document "Policy
Framework Core Information Model" [10]. Other documents may
subsequently be produced, with mappings of this same Core Information
Model to other storage technologies. Since the detailed semantics of
the Core Policy classes appear only in reference [10], that document
is a prerequisite for reading and understanding this document.
3. Inheritance Hierarchy for the LDAP Core Policy Schema
The following diagram illustrates the class hierarchy for the LDAP
Core Policy Schema classes:
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top
|
+--policy (abstract)
| |
| +--policyGroup (structural)
| |
| +--policyRule (structural)
| |
| +--policyRuleConditionAssociation (structural)
| |
| +--policyRuleActionAssociation (structural)
| |
| +--policyConditionInstance (structural)
| |
| +--policyActionInstance (structural)
| |
| +--policyElementAuxClass (auxiliary)
|
+--policyConditionAuxClass (auxiliary)
| |
| +---policyTimePeriodConditionAuxClass (auxiliary)
| |
| +---vendorPolicyConditionAuxClass (auxiliary)
|
+--policyActionAuxClass (auxiliary)
| |
| +---vendorPolicyActionAuxClass (auxiliary)
|
+--policyRepository (structural)
|
+--policySubtreesPtrAuxClass (auxiliary)
|
+--policyGroupContainmentAuxClass (auxiliary)
|
+--policyRuleContainmentAuxClass (auxiliary)
Figure 1. LDAP Class Inheritance Hierarchy for the Core Policy
Schema
4. General Discussion of Mapping the Information Model to LDAP
The classes described in Section 5 below contain certain optimizations
for a directory that uses LDAP as its access protocol. One example of
this is the use of auxiliary classes to represent some of the
relationships defined in the information model. Other data stores
might need to implement these relationships differently. A second
example is the introduction of classes specifically designed to
optimize retrieval of large amounts of policy-related data from a
directory. This section discusses some general topics related to the
mapping from the information model to LDAP.
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4.1. Summary of Class and Relationship Mappings
Eight of the classes in the LDAP Core Policy Schema come directly from
corresponding classes in the information model. Note that names of
classes begin with an upper case character in the information model
(although for CIM in particular, case is not significant in class and
property names), but with a lower case character in LDAP.
+---------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Information Model | LDAP Class |
+---------------------------+-----------------------------------+
+---------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Policy | policy |
+---------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| PolicyGroup | policyGroup |
+---------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| PolicyRule | policyRule |
+---------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| PolicyCondition | policyConditionAuxClass |
+---------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| PolicyAction | policyActionAuxClass |
+---------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| VendorPolicyCondition | vendorPolicyConditionAuxClass |
+---------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| VendorPolicyAction | vendorPolicyActionAuxClass |
+---------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| PolicyTimePeriodCondition | policyTimePeriodConditionAuxClass |
+---------------------------+-----------------------------------+
Figure 2. Mapping of Information Model Classes to LDAP
The relationships in the information model map to DN-pointer
attributes or to Directory Information Tree (DIT) containment in LDAP.
Two of the DN-pointer attributes appear in auxiliary classes, which
allows each of them to represent several relationships from the
information model.
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+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| Information Model Relationship | LDAP Attribute / Class |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| ResourceManagerCollectionPolicy| policyGroupsAuxContainedSet in |
| Group | policyGroupContainmentAuxClass |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| ResourceManagerPolicyGroup | policyGroupsAuxContainedSet in |
| | policyGroupContainmentAuxClass |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup | policyGroupsAuxContainedSet in |
| | policyGroupContainmentAuxClass |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| ResourceManagerCollectionPolicy| policyRulesAuxContainedSet in |
| Rule | policyRuleContainmentAuxClass |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| ResourceManagerPolicyRule | policyRulesAuxContainedSet in |
| | policyRuleContainmentAuxClass |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| PolicyRuleInPolicyGroup | policyRulesAuxContainedSet in |
| | policyRuleContainmentAuxClass |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| ConditionInPolicyRule | DIT containment |
| | [+ policyConditionDN in |
| | policyRuleConditionAssociation] |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| ConditionSubject | conditionSubject in |
| | policyConditionAuxClass |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| ConditionTarget | conditionTarget in |
| | policyConditionAuxClass |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| ActionInPolicyRule | DIT containment |
| | [+ policyActionDN in |
| | policyRuleActionAssociation] |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| PolicyRuleValidityPeriod | policyRuleValidityPeriodList in |
| | policyRule |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| ConditionInPolicyRepository | DIT containment |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| ActionInPolicyRepository | DIT containment |
+--------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
Figure 3. Mapping of Information Model Relationships to LDAP
Of the remaining classes in the LDAP Core Schema, two
(policyElementAuxClass, and policySubtreesPtrAuxClass) are included to
make navigation through the DIT and retrieval of the entries found
there more efficient. This topic is discussed in Section 4.4 below.
The remaining five classes in the LDAP Core Schema,
policyRuleConditionAssociation, policyRuleActionAssociation,
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policyConditionInstance, policyActionInstance, and policyRepository
are all involved with the representation of policy conditions and
policy actions in an LDAP directory. This topic is discussed in
Section 4.3 below.
4.2. Naming Attributes in the Core Schema
Instances in a directory are identified by distinguished names (DNs),
which provide the same type of hierarchical organization that a file
system provides in a computer system. A distinguished name is a
sequence of relative distinguished names (RDNs), where an RDN provides
a unique identifier for an instance within the context of its
immediate superior, in the same way that a filename provides a unique
identifier for a file within the context of the folder in which it
resides.
To preserve maximum naming flexibility for policy administrators, each
of the structural classes defined in this schema has its own naming
attribute. (The naming attribute policyConditionName is used in two
structural class: policyRuleConditionAssociation and
policyConditionInstance. As discussed below in Section 4.3, these are
the two structural classes to which the auxiliary class
policyConditionAuxClass may be attached. The naming attribute
policyActionName is similarly associated with two structural classes.)
Since the naming attributes are different, a policy administrator can,
by using these attributes, guarantee that there will be no name
collisions between instances of different classes, even if the same
VALUE is assigned to the instances' respective naming attributes.
The X.500 attribute commonName (cn) is included as a MAY attribute in
the abstract class policy, and thus by inheritance in all of its
subclasses. In X.500, commonName typically functions as an RDN
attribute, for naming instances of such classes as X.500's person.
Finally, for implementations that expect to map between CIM and LDAP
representations of policy information, a second MAY attribute,
cimName, is also included in the abstract class "policy". The value
of this attribute is derived algorithmically from the values of two
properties that are already present in a CIM policy instance. See the
appendix of this document for a complete description of the algorithm.
Each of the Core Schema classes thus has three attributes suitable for
naming: cn, its own class-specific attribute, and cimName. Any of
these attributes MAY be used for naming an instance of a Core Schema
class. Consequently, implementations MUST be able to accommodate
instances named in any of these ways.
Note that since they are required ("MUST") attributes, the class-
specific naming attributes are always present in instances of their
respective classes, even if they are not being used for naming the
instances. In these cases the class-specific naming attributes may be
used for other purposes. Note also that "cn", the class-specific
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naming attribute, and cimName SHOULD NOT be used together to form a
multi-part RDN, since support for multi-part RDNs is limited among
existing directory implementations.
4.3. Rule-Specific and Reusable Conditions and Actions
The Core Information Model [10] distinguishes between two types of
policy conditions and policy actions: ones associated with a single
policy rule, and ones that are reusable, in the sense that they may be
associated with more than one policy rule. There is no inherent
difference between a rule-specific condition or action and a reusable
one. There are, however, differences in how they are treated in a
policy repository. For example, it's natural to make the access
permissions for a rule-specific condition or action identical to those
for the rule itself. It's also natural for a rule-specific condition
or action to be removed from the policy repository at the same time
the rule is. With reusable conditions and actions, on the other hand,
access permissions and existence criteria must be expressible without
reference to a policy rule.
The preceding paragraph does not contain an exhaustive list of the
ways in which reusable and rule-specific conditions should be treated
differently. Its purpose is merely to justify making a semantic
distinction between rule-specific and reusable, and then reflecting
this distinction in the policy repository itself.
When the policy repository is realized in an LDAP-accessible
directory, the distinction between rule-specific and reusable
conditions and actions is realized via DIT containment. Figure 4
illustrates a policy rule Rule1 with one rule-specific condition CA
and one rule-specific action AB. Because the condition and action are
specific to Rule1, the auxiliary classes ca and ab that represent them
are attached, respectively, to the structural classes CA and AB.
These structural classes represent not the condition ca and action ab
themselves, but rather Rule1's ASSOCIATION to ca and ab.
Note that the existence dependency of a rule-specific condition or
action on its policy rule follows in this case from the semantics of
DNs. Note also that for directory implementations supporting subtree-
based access permissions, it's easy to indicate that parties with
access to Rule1 also have access to its condition and action.
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+-----+
|Rule1|
| |
+-----+
* *
* *
**** ****
* *
* *
+-----+ +-----+
|CA+ca| |AB+ab|
+-----+ +-----+
+------------------------------+
|LEGEND: |
| ***** DIT containment |
| + auxiliary attachment |
+------------------------------+
Figure 4. Rule-Specific Policy Conditions and Actions
Figure 5 illustrates the same policy rule Rule1, but this time its
condition and action are reusable. The association classes CA and AB
are still present, and they are still DIT contained under Rule1. But
rather than having the auxiliary classes ca and ab attached to
themselves, CA and AB now contain DN pointers to other entries to
which these auxiliary classes are attached. These other entries, CIA
and AIB, are DIT contained under RepositoryX, which is an instance of
the class policyRepository. Because they are named under an instance
of policyRepository, ca and ab are clearly identified as reusable.
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+-----+ +-------------+
|Rule1| | RepositoryX |
| | | |
+-----+ +-------------+
* * * *
* * * *
**** **** * *
* * * *
* +--+ * *
* |AB| +------+ *
* | -|-------->|AIB+ab| *
+--+ +--+ +------+ *
|CA| +------+
| -|------------------------->|CIA+ca|
+--+ +------+
+------------------------------+
|LEGEND: |
| ***** DIT containment |
| + auxiliary attachment |
| ----> DN pointer |
+------------------------------+
Figure 5. Reusable Policy Conditions and Actions
The classes policyConditionAuxClass and policyActionAuxClass do not
themselves represent actual conditions and actions: these are
introduced in their subclasses. What policyConditionAuxClass and
policyActionAuxClass do introduce are the semantics of being a policy
condition or a policy action. These are the semantics that all the
subclasses of policyCondition and policyAction inherit. Among these
semantics are those of representing either a rule-specific or a
reusable policy condition or policy action.
In order to preserve the ability to represent either a rule-specific
or a reusable condition or action, all the subclasses of
policyCondition and policyAction MUST also be auxiliary classes.
4.4. Condition Subjects and Targets
While it is not universally true, policy conditions often involve
three different types of roles:
o A subject seeking access to a target resource;
o A target resource to which a subject is seeking access;
o A resource manager responsible for managing access to the target
resource and/or managing some service (e.g., QoS) associated with
access to the target resource.
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Some examples will help to clarify these types of roles. When a user
on the Internet wishes to communicate with a host located behind an
enterprise's firewall, the subject is the user, the target is the
host, and the resource manager is the firewall. Similarly, when a
user wishes to read a file, the subject is the user, the target is the
file, and the resource manager is the file manager of the system where
the file resides.
Sometimes these roles must be given a slightly different meaning in
order for them to apply. For example, if a router is either remarking
packets or giving them differential treatment based on the values in
the 5-tuples in their headers, we can say that the subject is (the
resource identified by) the source address and port number, the target
is (the resource identified by) the destination address and port
number, and the resource manager is the marking service on router
making the decisions. Here the subject isn't seeking access to the
target per se; the goal, instead, is to have a certain QoS for
communications between the subject and the target, where the subject's
right to communicate with the target is assumed to have already been
established.
In the CIM model, the PolicyCondition class has two optional
associations with the ManagedElement class: ConditionSubject and
ConditionTarget. These associations are optional for two reasons.
First, a particular condition may not have a subject, a target, or
both. Storage backups, for example, might be triggered whenever a
storage device reaches 90% of its capacity. The device approaching
its capacity is naturally regarded as the target of this rule, but
these is no subject in this case.
Secondly, a subject and/or a target for a policy condition may be
identified via properties of the PolicyCondition class itself, rather
than by reference to objects external to the policy condition. Thus
in the QoS example cited above, the subject and target might be
identified by comparing the values from a packet's header against
those in a Packet5Tuple property defined in an IP-specific subclass of
PolicyCondition. This would eliminate the need for object references
to additional objects representing the policy condition's subject and
target. The tradeoffs between a normalized representation of subjects
and targets and a denormalized one must be considered in each
application of the Core Model to a specific discipline.
In this document, the two associations ConditionSubject and
ConditionTarget are represented by two optional, multi-valued DN
pointers in the class policyCondition. Exactly what to do with an
entry reached via one of these pointers must be specified in a
subclass of PolicyCondition.
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4.5. Location and Retrieval of Policy Objects in the Directory
When a Policy Consumer goes to an LDAP directory to retrieve the
policy object instances relevant to the Policy Targets it serves, it
is faced with two related problems:
o How does it locate and retrieve the directory entries that apply to
its Policy Targets? These entries may include instances of the
Core Schema classes, instances of domain-specific subclasses of
these classes, and instances of other classes modeling such
resources as user groups, interfaces, and address ranges.
o How does it retrieve the directory entries it needs in an efficient
manner, so that retrieval of policy information from the directory
does not become a roadblock to scalability? There are two facets
to this efficiency: retrieving only the relevant directory
entries, and retrieving these entries using as few LDAP calls as
possible.
The placement of objects in the Directory Information Tree (DIT)
involves considerations other than how the policy-related objects will
be retrieved by a Policy Consumer. Consequently, all that the Core
Schema can do is to provide a "toolkit" of classes to assist the
policy administrator as the DIT is being designed and built. A Policy
Consumer SHOULD be able to take advantage of any tools that the policy
administrator is able to build into the DIT, but it MUST be able to
use a less efficient means of retrieval if that is all it has
available to it.
The basic idea behind the LDAP optimization classes is a simple one:
make it possible for a Policy Consumer to retrieve all the policy-
related objects it needs, and only those objects, using as few LDAP
calls as possible. An important assumption underlying this approach
is that the policy administrator has sufficient control over the
underlying DIT structure to define subtrees for storing policy
information. If the policy administrator does not have this level of
control over DIT structure, a Policy Consumer can still retrieve the
policy-related objects it needs individually. But it will require
more LDAP access operations to do the retrieval in this way.
Figure 6 illustrates how LDAP optimization is accomplished.
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+-----+
---------------->| A |
DN pointer to | | DN pointers to subtrees +---+
starting object +-----+ +------------------------->| C |
| o--+----+ +---+ +---+
| o--+------------->| B | / \
+-----+ +---+ / \
/ \ / \ / ... \
/ \ / \
/ \ / ... \
Figure 6. Using policySubtreesPtrAuxClass to Locate Policies
The Policy Consumer is configured initially with a DN pointer to some
entry in the DIT. The structural class of this entry is not
important; the Policy Consumer is interested only in the
policySubtreesPtrAuxClass attached to it. This auxiliary class
contains a multi-valued attribute with DN pointers to objects that
anchor subtrees containing policy-related objects of interest to the
Policy Consumer. Since policySubtreesPtrAuxClass is an auxiliary
class, it can be attached to an entry that the Policy Consumer would
need to access anyway - perhaps an entry containing initial
configuration settings for the Policy Consumer, or for a Policy Target
that uses the Policy Consumer.
Once it has retrieved the DN pointers, the Policy Consumer will direct
to each of the objects identified by them an LDAP request that all
entries in its subtree be evaluated against the selection criteria
specified in the request. The LDAP-enabled directory then returns all
entries in that subtree that satisfy the specified criteria.
The selection criteria always specify that object class = "policy".
Since all classes representing policy rules, policy conditions, and
policy actions, both in the Core Schema and in any domain-specific
schema derived from it, are subclasses of the abstract class policy,
this criterion evaluates to TRUE for all instances of these classes.
To accommodate special cases where a Policy Consumer needs to retrieve
objects that are not inherently policy-related (for example, an IP
address range object pointed to by a subclass of policyAction
representing the DHCP action "assign from this address range), the
auxiliary class policyElementAuxClass can be used to "tag" an entry,
so that it will be found by the selection criterion "object class =
policy".
The approach described in the preceding paragraph will not work for
certain directory implementations, because these implementations do
not support matching of auxiliary classes in the objectClass
attribute. For environments where these implementations are expected
to be present, the "tagging" of entries as relevant to policy can be
accomplished by inserting the special value "POLICY" into the list of
values contained in the policyKeywords attribute.
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If a Policy Consumer needs only a subset of the policy-related objects
in the indicated subtrees, then it can be configured with additional
selection criteria based on the policyKeywords attribute defined in
the policy class. This attribute supports both standardized and
administrator-defined values. Thus a Policy Consumer could be
configured to request only those policy-related objects containing the
keywords "DHCP" and "Eastern US".
To optimize what is expected to be a typical case, the initial request
from the client includes not only the object to which its "seed" DN
pointer points, but also the subtree contained under this object. The
filter for searching this subtree is whatever the client is going to
use later to search the other subtrees: "object class = policy",
presence of the keyword "POLICY", or presence of a more specific
policyKeyword.
Returning to the example in Figure 6, we see that in the best case, a
Policy Consumer can get all the policy-related objects it needs, and
only these objects, with exactly three LDAP requests: one to its
starting object A to get the pointers to B and C, as well as the
policy-related objects it needs from the subtree under A, and then one
each to B and C to get all the policy-related objects that pass the
selection criteria with which it was configured. Once it has
retrieved all of these objects, the Policy Consumer can then traverse
their various DN pointers locally to understand the semantic
relationships among them. The Policy Consumer should also be prepared
to find a pointer to another subtree attached to any of the objects it
retrieves, and to follow this pointer first, before it follows any of
the semantically significant pointers it has received. This recursion
permits a structured approach to identifying related policies. In
Figure 6, for example, if the subtree under B includes departmental
policies and the one under C includes divisional policies, then there
might be a pointer from the subtree under C to an object D that roots
the subtree of corporate-level policies.
Since a Policy Consumer has no guarantee that the entity that
populates the directory won't use the policySubtreesPtrAuxClass, a
Policy Consumer SHOULD understand this class, SHOULD be capable of
retrieving and processing the entries in the subtrees it points to,
and SHOULD be capable of doing all of this recursively. The same
requirements apply to any other entity needing to retrieve policy
information from the directory. Thus a Policy Management Tool that
retrieves policy entries from the directory in order to perform
validation and conflict detection SHOULD also understand and be
capable of using the policySubtreesPtrAuxClass. All of these
requirements are "SHOULD"s rather than "MUST"s because an LDAP client
that doesn't implement them can still access and retrieve the
directory entries it needs . The process of doing so will just be
less efficient than it would have been if the client had implemented
these optimizations.
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When it is serving as a tool for creating policy entries in the
directory, a Policy Management Tool SHOULD support creation of
policySubtreePtrAuxClass entries and their DN pointers.
4.5.1. Aliases and Other DIT-Optimization Techniques
Additional flexibility in DIT structure is available to the policy
administrator via LDAP aliasing. Figure 7 illustrates this
flexibility.
+-----+
---------------->| A |
DN pointer to | | DN pointers to subtrees +---+
starting object +-----+ +------------------------->| C |
| o--+----+ +---+ +---+
| o--+------------->| B | / \
+-----+ +---+ / \
/ \ / \ / ... \
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
+---+ / +------+ \
| X |<***************************|aliasX|
+---+ +------+
Figure 7. Addition of an Alias Object
Even if it is necessary to store a policy entry X in a directory
location separate from the other policy entries, batch retrieval using
policy subtrees can still be done. The administrator simply inserts
into one of the subtrees of policy entries an alias entry aliasX
pointing to the outlying entry X. When the Policy Consumer requests
all entries in the subtree under B, a response will be returned for
entry X, just as responses are returned for all the (non-alias)
entries that actually are in the subtree.
Since resolution of an alias to its true entry is handled entirely by
the LDAP directory, and is invisible to directory clients, Policy
Consumers need not do anything extra to support aliases. A Policy
Management Tool MAY make available to a policy administrator the
ability to create alias entries like the one in Figure 7.
In addition to aliases, there are several other techniques for
managing the placement of entries in the DIT and their retrieval by
directory clients. Among these other techniques are referrals, LDAP
URLs, attributes like seeAlso, and the extensible matching rule for
dereferencing DN pointers discussed in reference [16]. Discussion of
how these other techniques might be applied to policy-related entries
in a directory is outside the scope of this document.
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5. Class Definitions
The semantics for the LDAP classes mapped directly from the
information model are detailed in reference [10]. Consequently, all
that this document presents for these classes is a bare specification
of the LDAP classes and attributes. More details are provided for the
attributes listed above in Figure 3, which realize in LDAP the
relationships defined in the information model. Finally, the classes
that exist only in the LDAP Core Schema are documented fully in this
document.
The formal language for specifying the classes, attributes, and DIT
structure and content rules is that defined in reference [7].
Note: all attribute, object class, and name form OIDs, and all
structure rule integers, are place holders, and syntax OIDs in
definitions have been replaced by names for clarity.
5.1. The Abstract Class "policy"
The abstract class "policy" is a direct mapping of the abstract class
Policy from the Core Information Model. Four of the properties in
Policy map directly to attributes in the class "policy". The
remaining attribute of "policy" is constructed algorithmically from
two of the properties of the CIM class Policy.
NOTE: In the CIM model, the abstract class Policy is actually derived
from another abstract class, ManagedElement. The CIM class Policy
inherits the properties Caption and Description from ManagedElement,
but since the mapping of ManagedElement to an LDAP class falls outside
the scope of this document, these properties are mapped to
corresponding attributes of "policy" here. Similarly, the algorithm
for generating a value for the attribute cimName from the CIM
properties NamePath and SuperiorPath is specified here (in the
appendix), even though strictly speaking it belongs to the mapping of
ManagedElement.
The class value "policy" is also used as the mechanism for identifying
policy-related instances in the Directory Information Tree. An
instance of any class may be "tagged" with this class value by
attaching to it the auxiliary class policyElementAuxClass.
The class definition is as follows:
( <oid-oc1> NAME 'policy'
DESC 'An abstract class with five attributes for describing
a policy-related instance.'
SUP top
ABSTRACT
MAY (cn $ cimName $ caption $ description $ policyKeywords)
)
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The attributes "cn" and "description" are defined in X.520. The
remaining two attributes are defined as:
( <oid-at1> NAME 'cimName'
DESC 'For mapping from CIM, a string constructed by taking
the string difference between the CIM properties
NamePath and SuperiorPath. See the Appendix to this
document for more on this algorithm, including an
example.'
SYNTAX IA5String
EQUALITY caseExactIA5Match
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at2> NAME 'caption'
DESC 'A one-line description of this policy-related object.'
SYNTAX IA5String
EQUALITY caseExactIA5Match
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at3> NAME 'policyKeywords'
DESC 'A set of keywords to assist directory clients in
locating the policy objects applicable to them. Each
value of the multi-valued attribute contains a single
keyword. Standard keyword values are listed in the
Policy Core Information Model document.'
SYNTAX IA5String
EQUALITY caseExactIA5Match
)
5.2. The Class policyGroup
The class definition for policyGroup is as follows. Note that this
class definition does not include attributes to realize the
PolicyRuleInPolicyGroup and PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup associations from
the object model, since a policyGroup object points to instances of
policyGroup and policyRule via, respectively, the pointer in
policyGroupContainmentAuxClass and the pointer in
policyRuleContainmentAuxClass.
( <oid-oc2> NAME 'policyGroup'
DESC 'A container for either a set of related policyRules or
a set of related policyGroups.'
SUP policy
MUST (policyGroupName)
)
The following DIT content rule indicates that an instance of
policyGroup may have attached to it either DN pointers to one or more
other policyGroups, or DN pointers to one or more policyRules.
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( <oid-oc2>
NAME 'policyGroupContentRule'
DESC 'shows what auxiliary classes go with this object'
AUX (policyGroupContainmentAuxClass $
policyRuleContainmentAuxClass)
)
The following DIT structure rules indicate that an instance of
policyGroup may be named under any superior, using any of its three
naming attributes.
NOTE: In the CIM model, instances of both PolicyGroup and PolicyRule
are named within the scope of ("are weak to" in the CIM jargon) an
instance of the CIM class System, or one of its subclasses. The most
natural way to map a weak relationship of this type is to DIT
structure rules specifying that an instance of policyGroup or
policyRule is subordinate to an object representing a CIM System.
Since, however, the mapping of CIM's System class to an LDAP class
falls outside the scope of this document, the DIT structure rules that
follow do not constrain the superiors under which an instance of
PolicyGroup may be named.
( <oid-nf1> NAME 'policyGroupNameForm1'
OC policyGroup
MUST (cn)
)
( <sr1> NAME 'policyGroupStructuralRule1'
FORM policyGroupNameForm1
)
( <oid-nf2> NAME 'policyGroupNameForm2'
OC policyGroup
MUST (policyGroupName)
)
( <sr2> NAME 'policyGroupStructuralRule2'
FORM policyGroupNameForm2
)
( <oid-nf15> NAME 'policyGroupNameForm3'
OC policyGroup
MUST (cimName)
)
( <sr15> NAME 'policyGroupStructuralRule3'
FORM policyGroupNameForm3
)
The one attribute of policyGroup is defined as:
( <oid-at4> NAME 'policyGroupName'
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DESC 'The user-friendly name of this policy group.'
SYNTAX IA5String
EQUALITY caseExactIA5Match
SINGLE-VALUE
)
5.3. The Class policyRule
This class represents the "If Condition then Action" semantics
associated with a policy. The conditions and actions associated with
a policy rule are modeled, respectively, with auxiliary subclasses of
the auxiliary classes policyConditionAuxClass and
policyActionAuxClass. Each of these auxiliary subclasses is attached
to an instance of one of two structural classes. A subclass of
policyConditionAuxClass is attached either to an instance of
policyRuleConditionAssociation or to an instance of
policyConditionInstance. Similarly, a subclass of
policyActionAuxClass is attached either to an instance of
policyRuleActionAssociation or to an instance of policyActionInstance.
Of the eight attributes in the policyRule class, seven are mapped
directly from corresponding properties in the information model. The
eighth attribute, policyRuleValidityPeriodList, realizes the
PolicyRuleValidityPeriod association from the information model.
Since this association has no "extra" properties (besides those that
tie the association to its associated objects), the attribute
policyRuleValidityPeriodList is simply a multi-valued DN pointer.
(Relationships in the information model can have "extra" properties
because CIM represents relationships as classes. See Sections 5.4 and
5.5 for examples of "extra" properties and how they are mapped to
LDAP.) This attribute provides an unordered set of DN pointers to one
or more instances of the policyTimePeriodConditionAuxClass, indicating
when the policy rule is scheduled to be active and when it is
scheduled to be inactive. A policy rule is scheduled to be active if
it is active according to AT LEAST ONE of the
policyTimePeriodConditionAuxClass instances pointed to by this
attribute.
The ConditionInPolicyRule and ActionInPolicyRule associations,
however, have additional properties: ActionInPolicyRule has an
integer to sequence the actions, and ConditionInPolicyRule has an
integer to group the conditions, and a Boolean to specify whether a
condition is to be negated. In the Core Schema, these extra
association properties are represented as attributes of two classes
introduced specifically to model the associations:
policyRuleConditionAssociation and policyRuleActionAssociation,
defined, respectively, in Sections 5.4 and 5.5. Thus they do not
appear as attributes of the class policyRule.
The class definition of policyRule is as follows:
( <oid-oc3> NAME 'policyRule'
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DESC 'The central class for representing the "If Condition
then Action" semantics associated with a policy rule.'
SUP policy
MUST (policyRuleName)
MAY (policyRuleEnabled $ policyRuleConditionListType $
policyRuleValidityPeriodList $ policyRuleUsage $
policyRulePriority $ policyRuleMandatory $
policyRuleSequencedActions)
)
The following DIT structure rules indicate that an instance of
policyRule may be named under any superior, using any of its three
naming attributes.
NOTE: In the CIM model, instances of both PolicyGroup and PolicyRule
are named within the scope of ("are weak to" in the CIM jargon) an
instance of the CIM class System, or one of its subclasses. The most
natural way to map a weak relationship of this type is to DIT
structure rules specifying that an instance of policyGroup or
policyRule is subordinate to an object representing a CIM System.
Since, however, the mapping of CIM's System class to an LDAP class
falls outside the scope of this document, the DIT structure rules that
follow do not constrain the superiors under which an instance of
PolicyRule may be named.
( <oid-nf3> NAME 'policyRuleNameForm1'
OC policyRule
MUST (cn)
)
( <sr3> NAME 'policyRuleStructuralRule1'
FORM policyRuleNameForm1
)
( <oid-nf4> NAME 'policyRuleNameForm2'
OC policyRule
MUST (policyRuleName)
)
( <sr4> NAME 'policyRuleStructuralRule2'
FORM policyRuleNameForm2
)
( <oid-nf16> NAME 'policyRuleNameForm3'
OC policyRule
MUST (cimName)
)
( <sr16> NAME 'policyRuleStructuralRule3'
FORM policyRuleNameForm3
)
The attributes of policyRule are defined as follows:
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( <oid-at5> NAME 'policyRuleName'
DESC 'The user-friendly name of this policy rule.'
SYNTAX IA5String
EQUALITY caseExactIA5Match
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at6> NAME 'policyRuleEnabled'
DESC 'An enumeration indicating whether a policy rule is
administratively enabled, administratively disabled, or
enabled for debug mode. The defined values for this
attribute are enabled(1), disabled(2), and
enabledForDebug(3).'
SYNTAX INTEGER
EQUALITY integerMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at7> NAME 'policyRuleConditionListType'
DESC 'Indicates whether the list of policy conditions
associated with this policy rule is in disjunctive
normal form (DNF) or conjunctive normal form (CNF).
Defined values are DNF(1) and CNF(2).'
SYNTAX INTEGER
EQUALITY integerMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at8> NAME 'policyRuleValidityPeriodList'
DESC 'Distinguished names of policyTimePeriodConditions that
determine when the policyRule is scheduled to be active
/ inactive. No order is implied.'
SYNTAX DN
EQUALITY distinguishedNameMatch
)
( <oid-at9> NAME 'policyRuleUsage'
DESC 'This attribute is used to provide guidelines on how
this policy should be used.'
SYNTAX DirectoryString
EQUALITY caseIgnoreMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at10> NAME 'policyRulePriority'
DESC 'A non-negative integer for prioritizing this policyRule
relative to other policyRules. A larger value indicates
a higher priority.'
SYNTAX INTEGER
EQUALITY integerMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
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( <oid-at11> NAME 'policyRuleMandatory'
DESC 'A flag indicating that the evaluation of the
policyConditions and execution of policyActions (if the
condition list evaluates to True) is required.'
SYNTAX Boolean
EQUALITY booleanMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at12> NAME 'policyRuleSequencedActions'
DESC 'An enumeration indicating how to interpret the action
ordering indicated via the policyRuleActionList
attribute. The defined values for this attribute are
mandatory(1), recommended(2), and dontCare(3).'
SYNTAX INTEGER
EQUALITY integerMatch
)
5.4. The Class policyRuleConditionAssociation
This class contains attributes to represent the "extra" properties of
the information model's ConditionInPolicyRule association. Instances
of this class are related to an instance of policyRule via DIT
containment. The policy conditions themselves are represented by
auxiliary subclasses of the auxiliary class policyConditionAuxClass.
These auxiliary classes are attached directly to instances of
policyRuleConditionAssociation for rule-specific policy conditions.
For a reusable policy condition, the auxiliary class is attached to an
instance of the class policyConditionInstance, and there is a DN
pointer to this instance from the instance of
policyRuleConditionAssociation.
The class definition is as follows:
( <oid-oc4> NAME 'policyRuleConditionAssociation'
DESC 'The class contains attributes characterizing the
relationship between a policy rule and one of its
policy conditions.'
SUP policy
MUST (policyConditionGroupNumber $ policyConditionNegated $
policyConditionName)
MAY (policyConditionDN)
)
The following DIT content rule indicates that an instance of
policyRuleConditionAssociation may have attached to it the auxiliary
class policyConditionAuxClass, or one of its subclasses. This
combination represents a rule-specific policy condition.
( <oid-oc4>
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NAME 'policyRuleConditionAssociationContentRule'
DESC 'shows what auxiliary classes go with this object'
AUX (policyConditionAuxClass)
)
The following DIT structure rules indicate that an instance of
policyRuleConditionAssociation may be named under an instance of
policyRule, where each of these instances may be named using any of
their three naming attributes.
( <oid-nf5> NAME 'policyRuleConditionAssociationNameForm1'
OC policyRuleConditionAssociation
MUST (cn)
)
( <sr5> NAME 'policyRuleConditionAssociationStructuralRule1'
FORM policyRuleConditionAssociationNameForm1
SUP <sr3> <sr4> <sr16>
)
( <oid-nf6> NAME 'policyRuleConditionAssociationNameForm2'
OC policyRuleConditionAssociation
MUST (policyConditionName)
)
( <sr6> NAME 'policyRuleConditionAssociationStructuralRule2'
FORM policyRuleConditionAssociationNameForm2
SUP <sr3> <sr4> <sr16>
)
( <oid-nf17> NAME 'policyRuleConditionAssociationNameForm3'
OC policyRuleConditionAssociation
MUST (cimName)
)
( <sr17> NAME 'policyRuleConditionAssociationStructuralRule3'
FORM policyRuleConditionAssociationNameForm3
SUP <sr3> <sr4> <sr16>
)
The attributes of policyRuleConditionAssociation are defined as
follows. Note that the class-specific naming attribute
policyConditionName is also used in the class policyConditionInstance,
where it identifies a reusable policy condition.
( <oid-at13>
NAME 'policyConditionName'
DESC 'A user-friendly name for a policy condition.'
SYNTAX IA5String
EQUALITY caseExactIA5Match
SINGLE-VALUE
)
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( <oid-at14>
NAME 'policyConditionGroupNumber'
DESC 'The number of the group to which a policy condition
belongs. These groups are used to form the DNF or
CNF expression associated with a policy rule.
SYNTAX INTEGER
EQUALITY integerMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at15>
NAME 'policyConditionNegated'
DESC 'Indicates whether a policy condition is negated in
the DNF or CNF expression associated with a policy
rule. The value TRUE indicates that a condition is
negated'
SYNTAX Boolean
EQUALITY booleanMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at16>
NAME 'policyConditionDN'
DESC 'A DN pointer to a reusable policy condition.'
SYNTAX DN
EQUALITY distinguishedNameMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
5.5. The Class policyRuleActionAssociation
This class contains an attribute to represent the one "extra" property
of the information model's ActionInPolicyRule association, which makes
it possible to specify an order for executing the actions associated
with a policy rule. Instances of this class are related to an
instance of policyRule via DIT containment. The actions themselves
are represented by auxiliary subclasses of the auxiliary class
policyActionAuxClass. These auxiliary classes are attached directly
to instances of policyRuleActionAssociation for rule-specific policy
actions. For a reusable policy action, the auxiliary class is
attached to an instance of the class policyActionInstance, and there
is a DN pointer to this instance from the instance of
policyRuleActionAssociation.
The class definition is as follows:
( <oid-oc5> NAME 'policyRuleActionAssociation'
DESC 'The class contains an attribute that represents an
execution order for an action in the context of a
policy rule.'
SUP policy
MUST (policyActionOrder $
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policyActionName)
MAY (policyActionDN)
)
The following DIT content rule indicates that an instance of
policyRuleActionAssociation may have attached to it the auxiliary
class policyActionAuxClass, or one of its subclasses. This
combination represents a rule-specific policy action.
( <oid-oc5>
NAME 'policyRuleActionAssociationContentRule'
DESC 'shows what auxiliary classes go with this object'
AUX (policyActionAuxClass)
)
The following DIT structure rules indicate that an instance of
policyRuleActionAssociation may be named under an instance of
policyRule, where each of these instances may be named using any of
their three naming attributes.
( <oid-nf7> NAME 'policyRuleActionAssociationNameForm1'
OC policyRuleActionAssociation
MUST (cn)
)
( <sr7> NAME 'policyRuleActionAssociationStructuralRule1'
FORM policyRuleActionAssociationNameForm1
SUP <sr3> <sr4> <sr16>
)
( <oid-nf8> NAME 'policyRuleActionAssociationNameForm2'
OC policyRuleActionAssociation
MUST (policyActionName)
)
( <sr8> NAME 'policyRuleActionAssociationStructuralRule2'
FORM policyRuleActionAssociationNameForm2
SUP <sr3> <sr4> <sr16>
)
( <oid-nf18> NAME 'policyRuleActionAssociationNameForm3'
OC policyRuleActionAssociation
MUST (cimName)
)
( <sr18> NAME 'policyRuleActionAssociationStructuralRule3'
FORM policyRuleActionAssociationNameForm3
SUP <sr3> <sr4> <sr16>
)
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The attributes of policyRuleActionAssociation are defined as follows.
Note that the class-specific naming attribute policyActionName is also
used in the class policyActionInstance, where it identifies a reusable
policy action.
( <oid-at17>
NAME 'policyActionName'
DESC 'A user-friendly name for a policy action.'
SYNTAX IA5String
EQUALITY caseExactIA5Match
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at33>
NAME 'policyActionOrder'
DESC 'An integer indicating the relative order of an action
in the context of a policy rule.
SYNTAX INTEGER
EQUALITY integerMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at34>
NAME 'policyActionDN'
DESC 'A DN pointer to a reusable policy action.'
SYNTAX DN
EQUALITY distinguishedNameMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
5.6. The Auxiliary Class policyConditionAuxClass
The purpose of a policy condition is to determine whether or not the
set of actions (contained in the policyRule that the condition applies
to) should be executed or not. This auxiliary class can be attached
to instances of two other classes in the Core Policy Schema. When it
is attached to an instance of policyConditionAssociation, it
represents a rule-specific policy condition. When it is attached to
an instance of policyConditionInstance, it represents a reusable
policy condition.
Since both of the classes to which this auxiliary class may be
attached are derived from "policy", the attributes of "policy" will
already be defined for the entries to which this class attaches. Thus
this class is derived directly from "top".
The class definition is as follows:
( <oid-oc6> NAME 'policyConditionAuxClass'
DESC 'A class representing a condition to be evaluated in
conjunction with a policy rule.'
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SUP top
AUXILIARY
)
5.7. The Auxiliary Class policyTimePeriodConditionAuxClass
This class provides a means of representing the time periods during
which a policy rule is valid, i.e., active. The class definition is
as follows. Note that instances of this class are named with the
attributes cn and policyConditionName that they inherit, respectively,
from policy and from policyCondition.
( <oid-oc7> NAME 'policyTimePeriodConditionAuxClass'
DESC 'A class that provides the capability of enabling /
disabling a policy rule according to a predetermined
schedule.'
SUP policyConditionAuxClass
AUXILIARY
MAY (ptpConditionTime $ ptpConditionMonthOfYearMask $
ptpConditionDayOfMonthMask $ ptpConditionDayOfWeekMask $
ptpConditionTimeOfDayMask $ ptpConditionTimeZone)
)
The attributes of policyTimePeriodConditionAuxClass are defined as
follows:
( <oid-at19>
NAME 'ptpConditionTime'
DESC 'The range of calendar dates on which a policy rule is
valid. The format of the string is
[yyyymmddhhmmss]:[yyyymmddhhmmss]'
SYNTAX PrintableString
EQUALITY caseIgnoreMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at20>
NAME 'ptpConditionMonthOfYearMask'
DESC 'A mask identifying the months of the year in which a
policy rule is valid. The format is a string of 12
ASCII "0"s and "1"s, representing the months of the
year from January through December.'
SYNTAX PrintableString
EQUALITY caseIgnoreMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at21>
NAME 'ptpConditionDayOfMonthMask'
DESC 'A mask identifying the days of the month on which a
policy rule is valid. The format is a string of 62
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ASCII "0"s and "1"s. The first 31 positions represent
the days of the month in ascending order, from day 1 to
day 31. The next 31 positions represent the days of
the month in descending order, from the last day to the
day 31 days from the end.'
SYNTAX PrintableString
EQUALITY caseIgnoreMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at22>
NAME 'ptpConditionDayOfWeekMask'
DESC 'A mask identifying the days of the week on which a
policy rule is valid. The format is a string of seven
ASCII "0"s and "1"s, representing the days of the week
from Sunday through Saturday.'
SYNTAX PrintableString
EQUALITY caseIgnoreMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at23>
NAME 'ptpConditionTimeOfDayMask'
DESC 'The range of times at which a policy rule is valid. If
the second time is earlier than the first, then the
interval spans midnight. The format of the string is
hhmmss:hhmmss'
SYNTAX PrintableString
EQUALITY caseIgnoreMatch
)
( <oid-at24>
NAME 'ptpConditionTimeZone'
DESC 'The definition of the time zone for the
policyTimePeriodConditionAuxClass. The format of
the string is either "Z" (UTC) or <"+"|"-"><hhmm>'
SYNTAX PrintableString
EQUALITY caseIgnoreMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
5.8. The Auxiliary Class vendorPolicyConditionAuxClass
The class definition is as follows:
( <oid-oc8> NAME 'vendorPolicyConditionAuxClass'
DESC 'A class that defines a registered means to describe a
policy condition.'
SUP policyConditionAuxClass
AUXILIARY
MAY (vendorPolicyConstraintData $
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vendorPolicyConstraintEncoding)
)
The attribute definitions for vendorPolicyCondition are as follows:
( <oid-at25>
NAME 'vendorPolicyConstraintData'
DESC 'Escape mechanism for representing constraints that have
not been modeled as specific attributes. The format of
the values is identified by the OID stored in the
attribute vendorPolicyConstraintEncoding.'
SYNTAX OctetString
EQUALITY octetStringMatch
)
( <oid-at26>
NAME 'vendorPolicyConstraintEncoding'
DESC 'An OID identifying the format and semantics for this
instance"s vendorPolicyConstraintData attribute.'
SYNTAX OID
EQUALITY objectIdentifierMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
5.9. The Auxiliary Class policyActionAuxClass
The purpose of a policy action is to execute one or more operations
that will affect network traffic and/or systems, devices, etc. in
order to achieve a desired policy state. This auxiliary class can be
attached to instances of two other classes in the Core Policy Schema.
When it is attached to an instance of policyActionAssociation, it
represents a rule-specific policy action. When it is attached to an
instance of policyActionInstance, it represents a reusable policy
action.
Since both of the classes to which this auxiliary class may be
attached are derived from "policy", the attributes of "policy" will
already be defined for the entries to which this class attaches. Thus
this class is derived directly from "top".
The class definition is as follows:
( <oid-oc9> NAME 'policyActionAuxClass'
DESC 'A class representing an action to be performed as a
result of a policy rule.'
SUP top
AUXILIARY
)
5.10. The Auxiliary Class vendorPolicyActionAuxClass
The class definition is as follows:
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( <oid-oc10> NAME 'vendorPolicyActionAuxClass'
DESC 'A class that defines a registered means to describe a
policy action.'
SUP policyActionAuxClass
AUXILIARY
MAY (vendorPolicyActionData $ vendorPolicyActionEncoding)
)
The attribute definitions for vendorPolicyActionAuxClass are as
follows:
( <oid-at28>
NAME 'vendorPolicyActionData'
DESC 'Escape mechanism for representing actions that have not
been modeled as specific attributes. The format of the
values is identified by the OID stored in the attribute
vendorPolicyActionEncoding.'
SYNTAX OctetString
EQUALITY octetStringMatch
)
( <oid-at29>
NAME 'vendorPolicyActionEncoding'
DESC 'An OID identifying the format and semantics for this
instance"s vendorPolicyActionData attribute.'
SYNTAX OID
EQUALITY objectIdentifierMatch
SINGLE-VALUE
)
5.11. The Class policyConditionInstance
The role of this class in the Core Schema is to serve as the
structural class to which the auxiliary class policyCondition is
attached to form a reusable policy condition. See Section 4.3 for a
complete discussion of reusable policy conditions and the role that
this class plays in how they are represented.
In addition to the cn attribute it inherits from "policy", this class
uses the naming attribute policyConditionName, which was defined above
in Section 5.4.
The class definition is as follows:
( <oid-oc11> NAME 'policyConditionInstance'
DESC 'A structural class that contains a reusable policy
condition.'
SUP policy
MUST (policyConditionName)
)
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The following DIT content rule indicates that an instance of
policyConditionInstance may have attached to it an instance of the
auxiliary class policyCondition.
( <oid-oc11>
NAME 'policyConditionInstanceContentRule'
DESC 'shows what auxiliary classes go with this class'
AUX (policyConditionAuxClass)
)
The following DIT structure rules indicate that an instance of
policyConditionInstance may be named under an instance of
policyRepository, using any of its three naming attributes.
( <oid-nf9> NAME 'policyConditionInstanceNameForm1'
OC policyConditionInstance
MUST (cn)
)
( <sr9> NAME 'policyConditionInstanceStructuralRule1'
FORM policyConditionInstanceNameForm1
SUP <sr13> <sr14> <sr21>
)
( <oid-nf10> NAME 'policyConditionInstanceNameForm2'
OC policyConditionInstance
MUST (policyConditionName)
)
( <sr10> NAME 'policyConditionInstanceStructuralRule2'
FORM policyConditionInstanceNameForm2
SUP <sr13> <sr14> <sr21>
)
( <oid-nf19> NAME 'policyConditionInstanceNameForm3'
OC policyConditionInstance
MUST (cimName)
)
( <sr19> NAME 'policyConditionInstanceStructuralRule3'
FORM policyConditionInstanceNameForm3
SUP <sr13> <sr14> <sr21>
)
5.12. The Class policyActionInstance
The role of this class in the Core Schema is to serve as the
structural class to which the auxiliary class policyAction is attached
to form a reusable policy action. See Section 4.3 for a complete
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discussion of reusable policy actions and the role that this class
plays in how they are represented.
In addition to the cn attribute it inherits from "policy", this class
uses the naming attribute policyActionName, which was defined above in
Section 5.5.
The class definition is as follows:
( <oid-oc12> NAME 'policyActionInstance'
DESC 'A structural class that contains a reusable policy
action.'
SUP policy
MUST (policyActionName)
)
The following DIT content rule indicates that an instance of
policyActionInstance may have attached to it an instance of the
auxiliary class policyAction.
( <oid-oc12>
NAME 'policyActionInstanceContentRule'
DESC 'shows what auxiliary classes go with this class'
AUX (policyActionAuxClass)
)
The following DIT structure rules indicate that an instance of
policyActionInstance may be named under an instance of
policyRepository, using any of its three naming attributes.
( <oid-nf11> NAME 'policyActionInstanceNameForm1'
OC policyActionInstance
MUST (cn)
)
( <sr11> NAME 'policyActionInstanceStructuralRule1'
FORM policyActionInstanceNameForm1
SUP <sr13> <sr14> <sr21>
)
( <oid-nf12> NAME 'policyActionInstanceNameForm2'
OC policyActionInstance
MUST (policyActionName)
)
( <sr12> NAME 'policyActionInstanceStructuralRule2'
FORM policyActionInstanceNameForm2
SUP <sr13> <sr14> <sr21>
)
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( <oid-nf20> NAME 'policyActionInstanceNameForm3'
OC policyActionInstance
MUST (cimName)
)
( <sr20> NAME 'policyActionInstanceStructuralRule3'
FORM policyActionInstanceNameForm3
SUP <sr13> <sr14> <sr21>
)
5.13. The Auxiliary Class policyElementAuxClass
This class introduces no additional attributes, beyond those defined
in the class "policy" from which it is derived. Its role is to "tag"
an instance of a class defined outside the realm of policy as being
nevertheless relevant to a policy specification. This tagging can
potentially take place at two levels:
o Every instance to which policyElementAuxClass is attached becomes
an instance of the class "policy", since policyElementAuxClass is a
subclass of "policy". Thus a DIT search with the filter
"objectClass=policy" will return the instance. (As noted earlier,
this approach does not work for some directory implementations. To
accommodate these implementations, policy-related entries SHOULD be
tagged with the keyword "POLICY".)
o With the policyKeywords attribute that it inherits from "policy",
an instance to which policyElementAuxClass is attached can be
tagged as being relevant to a particular type or category of
policy, using standard keywords, administrator-defined keywords, or
both.
The class definition is as follows:
( <oid-oc13> NAME 'policyElementAuxClass'
DESC 'An auxiliary class used to tag instances of classes
defined outside the realm of policy as relevant to a
particular policy specification.'
SUP policy
AUXILIARY
)
5.14. The Class policyRepository
This class provides a container for reusable policy information, such
as reusable policy conditions and/or reusable policy actions.
The class definition is as follows:
( <oid-oc17> NAME 'policyRepository'
DESC 'A container for reusable information.'
SUP top
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MUST (policyRepositoryName)
MAY(cn $ cimName)
)
The following DIT structure rules indicate that an instance of
policyRepository may be named under any superior, using any of its
three naming attributes.
( <oid-nf13> NAME 'policyRepositoryNameForm1'
OC policyRepository
MUST (cn)
)
( <sr13> NAME 'policyRepositoryStructuralRule1'
FORM policyRepositoryNameForm1
)
( <oid-nf14> NAME 'policyRepositoryNameForm2'
OC policyRepository
MUST (policyRepositoryName)
)
( <sr14> NAME 'policyRepositoryStructuralRule2'
FORM policyRepositoryNameForm2
)
( <oid-nf21> NAME 'policyRepositoryNameForm3'
OC policyRepository
MUST (cimName)
)
( <sr21> NAME 'policyRepositoryStructuralRule3'
FORM policyRepositoryNameForm3
)
The two attributes of policyRepository are defined as follows. Note
that the cimName attribute defined here is the same attribute that was
defined earlier for the "policy" class.
( <oid-at35> NAME 'policyRepositoryName'
DESC 'The user-friendly name of this policy repository.'
SYNTAX IA5String
EQUALITY caseExactIA5Match
SINGLE-VALUE
)
( <oid-at1> NAME 'cimName'
DESC 'For mapping from CIM, a string constructed by taking
the string difference between the CIM properties
NamePath and SuperiorPath. See the Appendix to this
document for more on this algorithm, including an
example.'
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SYNTAX IA5String
EQUALITY caseExactIA5Match
SINGLE-VALUE
)
5.15. The Auxiliary Class policySubtreesPtrAuxClass
This auxiliary class provides a single, multi-valued attribute that
points to a set of objects that are at the root of DIT subtrees
containing policy-related information. By attaching this attribute to
instances of various other classes, a policy administrator has a
flexible way of providing an entry point into the directory that
allows a client to locate and retrieve the policy information relevant
to it.
These entries may be placed in the DIT such that a well-known DN can
be used by placing the structural entry (e.g. container) with the
policySubtreesPtrAuxClass attached thereto in the root of the
directory suffix. In this case, the subtree entry point can contain
and/or point to all related policy entries for any well-known policy
disciplines. Similarly, the subtree entry point may be placed in the
DIT such that the Policy Consumer's starting point is a subtree with
policy-related entries that are dependent on a hierarchically-related
set of subtrees (e.g., region, division, corporate). In this latter
case, DNs may be provided to the Policy Consumers via SNMP or other
techniques.
This object does not provide the semantic linkages between individual
policy objects, such as those between a policy group and the policy
rules that belong to it. Its only role is to enable efficient bulk
retrieval of policy-related objects, as described in Section 4.4.
Once the objects have been retrieved, a directory client can determine
the semantic linkages by following DN pointers such as
policyRulesAuxContainedSet locally.
Since policy-related objects will often be included in the DIT subtree
beneath an object to which this auxiliary class is attached, a client
SHOULD request the policy-related objects from the subtree under the
object with these pointers at the same time that it requests the
pointers themselves.
Since clients are expected to behave in this way, the policy
administrator SHOULD make sure that this subtree does not contain so
many objects unrelated to policy that an initial search done in this
way results in a performance problem. For example,
policySubtreesPtrAuxClass SHOULD NOT be attached to the partition root
for a large directory partition containing a relatively few policy-
related objects along with a large number of objects unrelated to
policy. A better approach would be to introduce a container object
immediately below the partition root, attach policySubtreesPtrAuxClass
to this container object, and then place the policy-related objects in
the subtree under it.
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The class definition is as follows:
( <oid-oc14> NAME 'policySubtreesPtrAuxClass'
DESC 'An auxiliary class providing DN pointers to roots of
DIT subtrees containing policy-related objects.'
SUP top
AUXILIARY
MAY (policySubtreesAuxContainedSet)
)
5.15.1. The Attribute policySubtreesAuxContainedSet
This attribute provides an unordered set of DN pointers to one or more
objects under which policy-related information is present. The
objects pointed to may or may not themselves contain policy-related
information.
The attribute definition is as follows:
( <oid-at30>
NAME 'policySubtreesAuxContainedSet'
DESC 'Distinguished names of objects that serve as roots for
DIT subtrees containing policy-related objects. No
order is implied.'
SYNTAX DN
EQUALITY distinguishedNameMatch
)
5.16. The Auxiliary Class policyGroupContainmentAuxClass
This auxiliary class provides a single, multi-valued attribute that
points to a set of policyGroups. By attaching this attribute to
instances of various other classes, a policy administrator has a
flexible way of providing an entry point into the directory that
allows a client to locate and retrieve the policyGroups relevant to
it.
As is the case with policyRules, a policy administrator might have
several different pointers to a policyGroup in the overall directory
structure. The policyGroupContainmentAuxClass is the mechanism that
makes it possible for the policy administrator to define all these
pointers.
The class definition is as follows:
( <oid-oc15> NAME 'policyGroupContainmentAuxClass'
DESC 'An auxiliary class used to bind policyGroups to an
appropriate container object.'
SUP top
AUXILIARY
MAY (policyGroupsAuxContainedSet)
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)
5.16.1. The Attribute policyGroupsAuxContainedSet
This attribute provides an unordered set of DN pointers to one or more
policyGroups associated with the instance of a structural class to
which this attribute has been appended. The attribute definition is
as follows:
( <oid-at31>
NAME 'policyGroupsAuxContainedSet'
DESC 'Distinguished names of policyGroups associated in some
way with the instance to which this attribute has been
appended. No order is implied.'
SYNTAX DN
EQUALITY distinguishedNameMatch
)
5.17. The Auxiliary Class policyRuleContainmentAuxClass
This auxiliary class provides a single, multi-valued attribute that
points to a set of policyRules. By attaching this attribute to
instances of various other classes, a policy administrator has a
flexible way of providing an entry point into the directory that
allows a client to locate and retrieve the policyRules relevant to it.
A policy administrator might have several different pointers to a
policyRule in the overall directory structure. For example, there
might be pointers to all policyRules for traffic originating in a
particular subnet from a directory entry that represents that subnet.
At the same time, there might be pointers to all policyRules related
to a particular DiffServ setting from an instance of a policyGroup
explicitly introduced as a container for DiffServ-related policyRules.
The policyRuleContainmentAuxClass is the mechanism that makes it
possible for the policy administrator to define all these pointers.
Note that the cn attribute does NOT need to be defined for this class.
This is because an auxiliary class is used as a means to collect
common attributes and treat them as properties of an object. A good
analogy is a #include file, except that since an auxiliary class is a
class, all the benefits of a class (e.g., inheritance) can be applied
to an auxiliary class.
The class definition is as follows:
( <oid-oc16> NAME 'policyRuleContainmentAuxClass'
DESC 'An auxiliary class used to bind policyRules to an
appropriate container object.'
SUP top
AUXILIARY
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MAY (policyRulesAuxContainedSet)
)
5.17.1. The Attribute policyRulesAuxContainedSet
This attribute provides an unordered set of DN pointers to one or more
policyRules associated with the instance of a structural class to
which this attribute has been appended. The attribute definition is:
( <oid-at32>
NAME 'policyRulesAuxContainedSet'
DESC 'Distinguished names of policyRules associated in some
way with the instance to which this attribute has been
appended. No order is implied.'
SYNTAX DN
EQUALITY distinguishedNameMatch
)
6. Extending the Core Schema
The following subsections provide general guidance on how to create a
domain-specific schema derived from the Core Schema, discuss how the
vendor classes in the Core Schema should be used, and explain how
policyTimePeriodConditions are related to other policy conditions.
6.1. Subclassing policyCondition and policyAction
In Section 4.3 above, there is a discussion of how, by representing
policy conditions and policy actions as auxiliary classes in a schema,
the flexibility is retained to instantiate a particular condition or
action as either rule-specific or reusable. This flexibility is lost
if a condition or action class is defined as structural rather than
auxiliary. For standardized schemata, this document specifies that
domain-specific information MUST be expressed in auxiliary subclasses
of policyCondition and policyAction. It is RECOMMENDED that non-
standardized schemata follow this practice as well.
6.2. Using the Vendor Policy Encoding Attributes
As discussed Section 5.8 "The Class vendorPolicyConditionAuxClass",
the attributes vendorPolicyConstraintData and
vendorPolicyConstraintEncoding are included in
vendorPolicyConditionAuxClass to provide an escape mechanism for
representing "exceptional" policy conditions. The attributes
vendorPolicyActionData and vendorPolicyActionEncoding in
vendorPolicyActionAuxClass class play the same role with respect to
actions. This enables interoperability between different vendors.
For example, imagine a network composed of access devices from vendor
A, edge and core devices from vendor B, and a policy server from
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vendor C. It is desirable for this policy server to be able to
configure and manage all of the devices from vendors A and B.
Unfortunately, these devices will in general have little in common
(e.g., different mechanisms, different ways for controlling those
mechanisms, different operating systems, different commands, and so
forth). The escape conditions provide a way for vendor-specific
commands to be encoded as OctetStrings, so that devices from different
vendors can be commonly managed by a single policy server.
6.3. Using Time Validity Periods
Time validity periods are defined as a subclass of policyCondition,
called policyTimePeriodCondition. This is to allow their inclusion in
the AND/OR condition definitions for a policyRule. Care should be
taken not to subclass policyTimePeriodCondition to add domain-specific
condition properties. For example, it would be incorrect to add
IPSec- or QoS-specific condition properties to the
policyTimePeriodCondition class, just because IPSec or QoS includes
time in its condition definition. The correct subclassing would be to
create IPSec or QoS-specific subclasses of policyCondition and then
combine instances of these domain-specific condition classes with the
validity period criteria. This is accomplished using the AND/OR
association capabilities for policyConditions in policyRules.
7. Security Considerations
o General: See reference [10].
o Users: See reference [10].
o Administrators of Schema: In general, most LDAP-accessible
directories do not permit old or out-of-date schemas, or schema
elements to be deleted. Instead, they are rendered inactive. This
makes it that much more important to get it right the first time on
an operational system, in order to avoid complex inactive schema
artifacts from lying about in the operational directory. The good
news is that it is expected that large network operators will
change schema design infrequently, and, when they do, the schema
creation changes will be tested on an off-line copy of the
directory before the operational directory is updated. Typically,
a small group of directory schema administrators will be authorized
to make these changes in a service provider or enterprise
environment. The ability to maintain audit trails is also required
here.
o Administrators of Schema Content (Directory Entries): This group
requires authorization to load values (entries) into a policy
repository directory schema, i.e. read/write access. An audit
trail capability is also required here.
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o Applications and Policy Consumers: These entities must be
authorized for read-only access to the policy repository directory,
so that they may acquire policy for the purposes of passing it to
their respective enforcement entities.
o Security Disciplines:
o Audit Trail (Non-repudiation): In general, standardizing
mechanisms for non-repudiation is outside the scope of the IETF;
however, we can certainly document the need for this function in
systems which maintain and distribute policy. The dependency for
support of this function is on the implementers of these systems,
and not on any specific standards for implementation. The
requirement for a policy system is that a minimum level of
auditing via an auditing facility must be provided. Logging
should be enabled. This working group will not specify what this
minimal auditing function consists of.
o Access Control/Authorization: Access Control List (ACL)
functionality must be provided. Standards for directories which
use LDAPv3 as an access mechanism are still being worked on in
the LDAPext working group, as of this writing. The two
administrative sets of users documented above will form the basis
for two administrative use cases which require support.
o Authentication: In the LDAP-accessible directory case, both TLS
and Kerboros are acceptable for authentication. Existing LDAP
implementations provide these functions within the context of the
BIND request, which is adequate. We advise against using weaker
mechanisms, such as clear text and HTTP Digest. Mutual
authentication is recommended. The LDAPv3 protocol supports
this, but implementations vary in the functionality that they
support.
o Integrity/Privacy: In the LDAP-accessible directory case, TLS
is acceptable for encryption and data integrity on the wire. If
physical or virtual access to the policy repository is in
question, it may also be necessary to encrypt the policy data as
it is stored on the file system; however, specification of
mechanisms for this purpose are outside the scope of this
working group. In any case, we recommend that the physical
server be located in a physically secure environment.
In the case of Policy Consumer-to-Policy Target communications, the
use of IPSEC is recommended for providing confidentiality, data
origin authentication, integrity and replay prevention. See
reference [11].
o Denial of Service: We recommend the use of multiple policy
repository directories, such that a denial of service attack on any
one directory server will not make all policy data inaccessible to
legitimate users. However, this still leaves a denial of service
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attack exposure. Our belief is that the use of a policy schema, in
a centrally administered but physically distributed policy
directory, does not increase the risk of denial of service attacks;
however, such attacks are still possible. If executed
successfully, such an attack could prevent Policy ConsumerÆs from
accessing a policy repository, and thus prevent them from acquiring
new policy. In such a case, the Policy Consumers, and associated
Policy Targets would continue operating under the policies in force
before the denial of service attack was launched. Note that
exposure of policy systems to denial of service attacks is not any
greater than the exposure of DNS with DNSSEC in place.
o Other LDAP-accessible Directory Schema Considerations:
o Replication: Replication among directory copies across servers
should also be protected. Replicating over connections secured
by SSL or IPSEC is recommended.
8. Intellectual Property
The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any
intellectual property or other rights that might be claimed to pertain
to the implementation or use of the technology described in this
document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or
might not be available; neither does it represent that it has made any
effort to identify any such rights. Information on the IETF's
procedures with respect to rights in standards-track and standards-
related documentation can be found in BCP-11.
Copies of claims of rights made available for publication and any
assurances of licenses to be made available, or the result of an
attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of
such proprietary rights by implementers or users of this specification
can be obtained from the IETF Secretariat.
The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any
copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary
rights which may cover technology that may be required to practice
this standard. Please address the information to the IETF Executive
Director.
9. Acknowledgments
This document is closely aligned with the work being done in the
Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) Service Level Agreements and
Networks working groups. As noted, the Core Schema described here was
initially defined in references [2] and [3]. We would especially like
to thank Raju Rajan, Sanjay Kamat, Andrea Westerinen, Lee Rafalow, Raj
Yavatkar, Glenn Waters, David Black, Michael Richardson, Mark Stevens,
David Jones, and Hugh Mahon for their helpful comments.
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10. References
[1] Strassner, J., and E. Ellesson, "Terminology for describing network
policy and services", draft-ietf-policy-terms-00.txt, June 1999.
[2] Bhattacharya, P., and R. Adams, W. Dixon, R. Pereira, R. Rajan, "An
LDAP Schema for Configuration and Administration of IPSec based
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)", Internet-Draft work in progress,
October 1998
[3] Rajan, R., and J. C. Martin, S. Kamat, M. See, R. Chaudhury, D.
Verma, G. Powers, R. Yavatkar, "Schema for Differentiated Services
and Integrated Services in Networks", Internet-Draft work in
progress, October 1998
[4] Strassner, J. and S. Judd, "Directory-Enabled Networks", version
3.0c5 (August 1998).
[5] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement
Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[6] Hovey, R., and S. Bradner, "The Organizations Involved in the IETF
Standards Process", BCP 11, RFC 2028, October 1996.
[7] Wahl, M., and A. Coulbeck, T. Howes, S. Kille, "Lightweight
Directory Access Protocol (v3): Attribute Syntax Definitions", RFC
2252, December 1997.
[8] Strassner, J., policy architecture BOF presentation, 42nd IETF
Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, October, 1998
[9] DMTF web site, http://www.dmtf.org.
[10] Moore, B., and E. Ellesson, J. Strassner, "Policy Framework Core
Information Model", draft-ietf-policy-core-info-model-02.txt,
October 1999.
[11] Yavatkar, R., and R. Guerin, D. Pendarakis, "A Framework for
Policy-based Admission Control", draft-ietf-rap-framework-03.txt,
June 1999.
[12] Stevens, M., and W. Weiss, H. Mahon, B. Moore, J. Strassner, G.
Waters, A. Westerinen, J. Wheeler, "Policy Framework", draft-ietf-
policy-framework-00.txt, September, 1999.
[13] Mahon, H., "Requirements for a Policy Management System", draft-
ietf-policy-req-01.txt, October 1999.
[14] Snir, Y., and Y. Ramberg, J. Strassner, "QoS Policy Framework
Information Model", draft-ietf-qos-policy-schema-01.txt, October
1999.
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[15] Weiss, W., and J. Strassner, A. Westerinen, "Terminology for
describing network policy and services", draft-weiss-policy-device-
qos-model-00.txt, June 1999.
[16] Moats, R., and J. Maziarski, J. Strassner, "Extensible Match Rule
to Dereference Pointers", draft-moats-ldap-dereference-match-01.txt
October 1999.
11. Authors' Addresses
John Strassner
Cisco Systems, Bldg 15
170 West Tasman Drive
San Jose, CA 95134
Phone: +1 408-527-1069
Fax: +1 408-527-1722
E-mail: johns@cisco.com
Ed Ellesson
IBM Corporation / Tivoli, JDGA/501
4205 S. Miami Blvd.
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709
Phone: +1 919-254-4115
Fax: +1 919-254-6243
E-mail: ellesson@tivoli.com
Bob Moore
IBM Corporation, BRQA/502
4205 S. Miami Blvd.
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709
Phone: +1 919-254-4436
Fax: +1 919-254-6243
E-mail: remoore@us.ibm.com
Ryan Moats
15621 Drexel Circle
Omaha, NE 68135
USA
E-mail: jayhawk@att.com
12. Full Copyright Statement
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved.
This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind,
provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this
document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
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the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing
Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined
in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as required to
translate it into languages other than English.
The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
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13. Appendix: Constructing the Value of the cimName Attribute
Within a CIM name space, the naming is basically flat; all instances
are identified by the values of their key properties, and each
combination of key values must be unique. A limited form of
hierarchical naming is available in CIM by using weak relationships:
since a weak relationship involves propagation of key properties and
their values from the superior object to the subordinate one, the
subordinate object can be thought of as being named "under" the
superior object. Weak relationships are inflexible, however, because
they force all instances of a class to be named in exactly the same
way. For classes like PolicyCondition and PolicyAction, there needs
to be a way to make a class weak to two other classes, so that a
particular instance of PolicyCondition can be named within the scope
either of a PolicyRule (if it's a rule-specific condition) or of a
PolicyRepository (if it's a reusable condition).
To add flexible hierarchical naming to CIM's mostly flat name space,
two CIM properties are introduced in the abstract class
ManagedElement: NamePath and SuperiorPath. SuperiorPath holds a
string that identifies the CIM object serving as the superior (that
is, the naming context) for the object that contains SuperiorPath.
The value of NamePath is just a longer string combining first the
information from SuperiorPath that identifies the superior object, and
then the information from this object that identifies it within the
context of its superior.
SuperiorPath and NamePath share the same syntax - a NamePath is just
longer than a SuperiorPath. Exact details are still being worked out
in the DMTF, but here are the current syntax specifications:
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propvalpair := <propertyname>=<convert2string(propertyvalue)>
classproplist := <classname>.<propvalpair>[,<propvalpair>]*
NamePath := <classproplist>[;<classproplist>]*
SuperiorPath := <classproplist>[;<classproplist>]*
In both NamePath and SuperiorPath, the <classproplist>s are ordered by
name scoping hierarchy; in a <classproplist>, the <propvalpair>s are
ordered alphabetically. Ordering the <propvalpair>s within a
<classproplist> makes it possible to do simple string matches on
NamePath and SuperiorPath. The order of the <classproplist>s in a
NamePath or SuperiorPath represents the hierarchy of name scopes.
Spaces are suppressed between <classproplist>s and <propvalpair>s, but
not within convert2string(propertyvalue) results; the goal once again
is to make the results of string operations predictable.
The convert2string grammar is as follows:
string => string
boolean => "True" | "False"
uintX => normal text mapping
sintX => normal text mapping
realX => <<currently under discussion in the DMTF>>
datetime => directory generalized time string
Let's look at two examples. In the first example there is a reusable
PolicyCondition named "MyCondition" that lives in a policy repository
named "MyRepository". This condition is an instance of a subclass of
PolicyCondition named QosPolicyCondition. Since PolicyRepository is a
subclass of System (in CIM), "MyRepository" has global naming scope.
In CIM, "MyCondition" would be identified by three keys:
SuperiorPath = "PolicyRepository.CCN=""PolicyRepository",
PolicyRepositoryName=""MyRepository"""
CCN="QosPolicyCondition"
PolicyConditionName="MyCondition"
The value of the non-key property NamePath for "MyCondition" would
just be the value of SuperiorPath extended with the object's other
keys:
NamePath = "PolicyRepository.CCN=""PolicyRepository",
PolicyRepositoryName=""MyRepository"";
PolicyCondition.CCN=""QosPolicyCondition"",
PolicyConditionName=""MyCondition"""
Mapping to LDAP now, the value of the attribute cimName for
"MyCondition" is the string difference (NamePath minus SuperiorPath),
that is,
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"PolicyRepository.CCN=""PolicyRepository",
PolicyRepositoryName=""MyRepository"";
PolicyCondition.CCN=""QosPolicyCondition"",
PolicyConditionName=""MyCondition"""
minus
"PolicyRepository.CCN=""PolicyRepository",
PolicyRepositoryName=""MyRepository"""
which equals
"PolicyCondition.CCN=""QosPolicyCondition"",
PolicyConditionName=""MyCondition"""
In CIM, I might have a second policy condition in "MyRepository", also
named "MyCondition", but it would have to instantiate a different
subclass of PolicyCondition, such as BgpPolicyCondition. Assuming that
the name hierarchy in CIM was mapped to DIT containment in LDAP, the
entries representing these two policy conditions would both be named
(that is, DIT contained) under the entry representing "MyRepository".
Thus they could not be named with the policyCondition attribute,
because they share the same value for this attribute: "MyCondition".
With cimName, however, there is no collision. The RDN for the first
condition is
cimName="PolicyCondition.CCN=""QosPolicyCondition"",
PolicyConditionName=""MyCondition"""
while that for the second is
cimName="PolicyCondition.CCN=""BgpPolicyCondition"",
PolicyConditionName=""MyCondition"""
For the second example, assume that "MyCondition" is a rule-specific
policy condition attached to a policy rule named "MyRule". "MyRule",
in turn, is named within the scope of a system named "MySystem". In
CIM, "MyCondition" would once again be identified by three keys, but
the value of SuperiorPath would be different:
SuperiorPath = "System.CCN=""System"",Name=""MySystem"";
PolicyRule.CCN=""PolicyRule",
PolicyRuleName=""MyRule"""
CCN="QosPolicyCondition"
PolicyConditionName="MyCondition"
The value of the non-key property NamePath for "MyCondition" is built
up in the same way it was in the first example:
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NamePath = "System.CCN=""System"",Name=""MySystem"";
PolicyRule.CCN=""PolicyRule",
PolicyRuleName=""MyRule"";
PolicyCondition.CCN=""QosPolicyCondition"",
PolicyConditionName=""MyCondition"""
We map to LDAP as we did before: the value of the cimName is the
string difference (NamePath minus SuperiorPath), that is,
"System.CCN=""System"",Name=""MySystem"";
PolicyRule.CCN=""PolicyRule",
PolicyRuleName=""MyRule"";
PolicyCondition.CCN=""QosPolicyCondition"",
PolicyConditionName=""MyCondition"""
minus
"System.CCN=""System"",Name=""MySystem"";
PolicyRule.CCN=""PolicyRule",
PolicyRuleName=""MyRule"""
which equals
"PolicyCondition.CCN=""QosPolicyCondition"",
PolicyConditionName=""MyCondition"""
It's fine for this rule-specific policy condition to have the same RDN
value as the reusable one from the first example, because the two are
named under different superiors in the DIT.
The DMTF is currently considering how widely to apply these techniques
for naming CIM objects and for mapping the objects to LDAP.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The preceding discussion assumes that the DMTF will in
fact approve the addition of SuperiorPath and NamePath to
ManagedElement. The dependency, though, applies only to the way in
which I have documented the process of creating a string for the
cimName attribute. If the DMTF rejects SuperiorPath and NamePath
properties, then the discussion can be recast in terms of building up
the cimName string from an object's CIM class and from its key
properties. The contents of the resulting string will be exactly the
same as those of a string constructed according to the procedure
described in this appendix.
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