CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Marcus Leech/Bell Northern Research Minutes of the Authenticated Firewall Traversal Working Group (AFT) The AFT Working Group meeting was held on Tuesday, 18 July. There were about 50 attendees---less than in Danvers, but Stockholm attendance in general was less than Danvers. The issues brought to the table were: o Extending the METHOD negotiation model to include exchange of arbitrary octet strings as METHOD descriptors. There was general consensus at the meeting that staying with the current model is a good thing (that is, no one objected). The chair's position is that ``better is the enemy of good enough.'' o Feedback from implementors on UDP DESTROY has indicated that it is not a terribly useful construct. There was general consensus that removing UDP DESTROY was a good thing. The new proposed model is that the connection that the UDP ASSOCIATE arrives on defines the lifetime of the UDP association it creates. o It is expected that interopability testing may commence soon, perhaps as early as mid August, it appeared that three independent implementations are already in progress, with the BNR-based one being the basis for the ICL/SESAME implementation. Volunteers are needed to step up to the plate. o IMAP was brought up as a possible framework for plugging SOCKS into. The chair (having reviewed the IMAP documents) feels that it belongs underneath SOCKS as a METHOD, rather than as something that SOCKS gets buried in. The chair generally feels that (modulo some clarifications, and incorporation of the technicals discussed in Stockholm) the document is close to being ready to go through Last Calls and ``Proposed.'' The chair expects to issue a new Internet-Draft on the base protocol by 28 July.