ONC Remote Procedure Call (oncrpc) Charter


NOTE: This charter is accurate as of the 37th IETF Meeting in San Jose. It may now be out-of-date. (Consider this a "snapshot" of the working group from that meeting.) Up-to-date charters for all active working groups can be found elsewhere in this Web server.

Chair(s)

Transport Area Director(s):

Mailing List Information

Description of Working Group

The Open Network Computing Remote Procedure Call Working Group was originally formed to update the RFCs that describe ONC RPC to reflect the current state of the deployed and accepted technology, and submit them for Internet standardization. RFCs have been submitted for the three core ONC technologies: RPC (RFC1831), RPC Binding (RFC 1833) and XDR (RFC1832).

During this work, IESG identified the area of security as requiring improvement prior to standardizing the core RPC technologies (RPC and RPC Binding). Therefore, the Working Group shall develop and define a security mechanism for ONC RPC which shall, at the minimum, allow for strong authentication of client and server principals. The core RPC technologies will be unblocked from the standards track once such a mechanism is approved as a Proposed Standard, provided that its design does not require changes to the core RPC technologies.

The basis for the work will be the RPCSEC_GSS Protocol Specification, draft-ietf-oncrpc-rpcsec_gss.00.txt.

The document editor will be Michael Eisler.

Background:

ONC RPC is a Remote Procedure Call technology that originated in Sun Microsystems in the early 1980s. ONC RPC was modelled on Xerox's Courier RPC protocols. It has been widely deployed on platforms from most major workstation vendors. It has been implemented on MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows NT, Mac, VMS, MVS, and practically all flavors of UNIX, among others. Sun Microsystems has delegated change control for the ONC RPC protocols for the purposes of making an Internet Standard to the IETF (see RFC 1790).

Goals and Milestones

Done
Post XDR: External Data Representation Standard (an update of RFC 1014) as an Internet-Draft.
Done
Post RPC: Remote Procedure Call Protocol Specification Version 2 (update of RFC 1057) as an Internet-Draft.
Done
Submit XDR document to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.
Done
Submit RPC document to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.
Feb 97
Submit strong security mechanism for ONC RPC to IESG for consideration as a Proposed Standard.
Mar 97
Submit core RPC documents to IESG for consideration as Draft Standards.
Mar 97
Conclude working group, leaving mailing list in place for pursuit of the subseqent standards stages.
Apr 97
submit XDR to IESG for consideration as Internet Standards.
Aug 97
Submit Strong security mechanism to IESG for consideration as a Draft Standard.

Current Internet-Drafts

Request for Comments