CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Gregory Ruth/BBN Minutes of the Internet Accounting Working Group (ACCT) Internet Accounting Background The Wednesday session reviewed the Internet Accounting Background document which had recently moved to the status of RFC (1272). The major changes to this document since the July IETF were in the areas of security requirements and counting strategy. The security concerns for internet accounting were discussed and fundamental requirements were found to be data integrity and data confidentiality. It was recommended that, to the extent possible, SNMP security services should be used to satisfy these requirements. The counting strategy discussion revolves around how packets (datagram fragments) should be counted: on entry to a network or upon successful delivery. Since there are good arguments for both methods (depending on the intended use of the accounting information), the capability for both should be included in and internet accounting system. Working group participants offered comments, criticisms and suggestions that will be incorporated into either a new version of the RFC or follow on documents. Two new items were suggested: (1) it should be mentioned that, in addition to the uses already listed, internet accounting may also be used to monitor the correct operation of the network (i.e. it may reveal problems/anomalies); (2) among the values that an internet accounting system could report for a flow might be a binary value indicating whether a flow was active or not in the measured time period. Internet Accounting Architecture On Thursday the Working Group discussed the latest draft of the Internet Accounting architecture. Although this document has existed for several months now and has undergone 3 or 4 extensive revisions, it still needs work, both in form and content. An intensive session was spent going over the document section be section and paragraph by paragraph to refine both form and content. In particular the Working Group worked on o Tightening up the statement of scope that this document will address. o More carefully and clearly defining the IA model (and its difference from the OSI accounting model) and the interactions of its components. 1 Numerous detailed (but important) changes were suggested and will be incorporated into the next version of the architecture document. Among them: o An explanation that we intend to develop a draft MIB and accounting control function definition, but not a complete protocol specification for accounting. o A clear statment about which packet processing layer accounting is done at, namely the IP layer. o The addition of a security section to the architecture document (and the role to be played by SNMP security services). o Definition of ``subscriber'', ``flow start time'' and other loosely used terms. The Working Group intends to conduct a dialog over the changes and a review of this document over the Internet in the next couple of months with a view of advancing it to the status of Internet Draft by the next IETF conference. General The Working Group has decided to combine the metering services document (formerly intended to be separate) with the architecture document and to announce our intention to produce a draft MIB document (separately) before the Working Group's effort is done. It was agreed that it is time once again to check what progress if any the OSI effort on accounting is making. Attendees Larry Blunk ljb@merit.edu David Bolen db3l@nis.ans.net Ronald Jacoby rj@sgi.com Kenneth Laube laube@bbn.com Mike Marcinkevicz mdm@csu.net Cyndi Mills cmills@bbn.com Rebecca Nitzan nitzan@nersc.gov Allan Rubens acr@merit.edu Gregory Ruth gruth@bbn.com Sharad Sanghi sharad@ans.net Timon Sloane peernet!timon@uunet.uu.net Sally Tarquinio sally@gateway.mitre.org Frank Welch 2