Charlie Kaufman is Technical Advisor for Security Matters Configuration of networks of devices has become a critical requirement for operators in today's highly interoperable networks. Operators from large to small have developed their own mechanisms or used vendor specific mechanisms to transfer configuration data to and from a device, and for examining device state information which may impact the configuration. Each of these mechanisms may be different in various aspects, such as session establishment, user authentication, configuration data exchange, and error responses. The NETCONF Working Group is chartered to produce a protocol suitable for network configuration, with the following characteristics: - Provides retrieval mechanisms which can differentiate between configuration data and non-configuration data - Is extensible enough so that vendors will provide access to all configuration data on the device using a single protocol - Has a programmatic interface (avoids screen scraping and formatting-related changes between releases) - Uses a textual data representation, that can be easily manipulated using non-specialized text manipulation tools. - Supports integration with existing user authentication methods - Supports integration with existing configuration database systems - Supports network wide configuration transactions (with features such as locking and rollback capability) - Is as transport-independent as possible - Provides support for asynchronous notifications. The NETCONF protocol is using XML for data encoding purposes, because XML is a widely deployed standard which is supported by a large number of applications. The NETCONF protocol should be independent of the data definition language and data models used to describe configuration and state data. However, the authorization model used in the protocol is dependent on the data model. Although these issues must be fully addressed to develop standard data models, only a small part of this work will be initially addressed. This group will specify requirements for standard data models in order to fully support the NETCONF protocol, such as: - identification of principals, such as user names or distinguished names - mechanism to distinguish configuration from non-configuration data - XML namespace conventions - XML usage guidelines The initial work started in 2003 and has already been completed and was restricted to following items: a) NETCONF Protocol Specification, which defines the operational model, protocol operations, transaction model, data model requirements, security requirements, and transport layer requirements. b) NETCONF over SSH Specification: Implementation Mandatory, c) NETCONF over BEEP Specification: Implementation Optional, d) NETCONF over SOAP Specification: Implementation Optional. These documents define how the NETCONF protocol is used with each transport protocol selected by the working group, and how it meets the security and transport layer requirements of the NETCONF Protocol Specification. e) NETCONF Notification Specification, which defines mechanisms that provide an asynchronous message notification delivery service for the NETCONF protocol. NETCONF Notification is an optional capability built on top of the base NETCONF definition and provides the capabilities and operations necessary to support this service. In the current phase of the incremental development of NETCONF the workgroup will focus on following items: 1. Fine-grain locking: The base NETCONF protocol only provides a lock for the entire configuration datastore, which is not deemed to meet important operational and security requirements. The NETCONF working group will produce a standards-track RFC specifying a mechanism for fine-grain locking of the NETCONF configuration datastore. 2. NETCONF monitoring: It is considered best practice for IETF working groups to include management of their protocols within the scope of the solution they are providing. The NETCONF working group will produce a standards-track RFC with mechanisms allowing NETCONF itself to be used to monitor some aspects of NETCONF operation. 3. Schema advertisement: Currently the NETCONF protocol is able to advertise which protocol features are supported on a particular netconf-capable device. However, there is currently no way to discover which XML Schema are supported on the device. The NETCONF working group will produce a standards-track RFC with mechanisms making this discovery possible (this item may be merged with "NETCONF monitoring" into a single document). 4. NETCONF over TLS: Based on implementation experience there is a need for a standards track document to define NETCONF over TLS as an optional transport for the NETCONF protocol. The following items have been identified as important but are currently not considered in scope for re-chartering and may be candidates for work when there is community consensus to take them on: - General improvements to the base protocol - Access Control requirements - NETCONF access to SMI-based MIB data