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Subject: Outline of Policy Distribution Protocols (Issue 62)


Here is an overview of a scheme for distributing policies. It is
designed to work with any version of XACML. If it seems reasonably
sound, I will create a Profile with specifics and Schema.

I have also posted this text to the wiki under Issue 62.

Hal
--------

XACML Policy Distribution

Assumptions

There is a Policy Administration Point (PAP) which holds all the
policies for some domain. There are a number of Policy Decision Points
(PDP) which retain in some local (typically non-volatile) storage all
the policies it considers to make decisions. Different PDPs may use
different subsets of the policies held by the PAP. A PAP will typically
serve a number of PDPs. Conceivably a PDP may get its policies from
several PAPs, however I am not aware of a motive for this usecase.

This protocol is concerned only with the interaction between one PDP and
one PAP. It is assumed that the PAP knows what policies a given PDP
should get by some unspecified means. In a real deployment, this might
be based on manual configuration, some portion of the policies such as
their Targets or by some other means. It is assumed that each PDP has a
unique identifier which the PAP knows in advance.

The protocol should make it easy to recover from failures of either
participant or the communications link. Also in most cases work done
prior to a failure should not have to be repeated. The protocol should
make it possible for the PDP to determine that it has a complete and
consistent set of policies.

All XACML Policies and Policy Sets contain an identifier. Different
policies can contain the same identifier, but they will have different
date/times. The combination of Policy Identifier and date/time is
assumed to be unique. For the purposes of this discussion the Id &
date/time pair are called a Policy Id.

Two different protocols are defined, a push protocol (controlled by the
PAP) and a pull protocol (controlled by the PDP). Both protocols have
different advantages and disadvantages. It is expected that each will be
used in different environments.

Push Protocol

1 Req. (Optional)  PDP -> PAP request policy update.

This message will be useful in cases such as a PDP first starting up.

2. PAP -> PDP request current policy list

This can be sent in response to an update request or as an unsolicited
message. A PAP might initiate the request because an Administrator has
updated the policies.

2. PDP -> PAP response with list of Policy Ids currently held by the
PDP. Optionally the PDP can specify a maximum message size for policy
updates.

PAP compares the policies held with the list of policies the PDP should
hold.

3. PAP -> PDP Policy update batch.

The batch contains two kinds of items:

A. Delete policy - specifies the Policy Id of a Policy to delete
B. Add policy - contains Policy or Policy Set to add

(Batch mechanism TBD. Could use SPML batch function or WS-RM sequence.)

Each message in batch should be acknowledged. PDP should implement
atomic update. No action should be taken until complete batch is
received. Once batch is complete, policy evaluation should cease. All
deletes and adds should be applied. Then evaluation should resume.

Pull Protocol

1. PDP -> PAP Request current policy list
1. PAP -> PDP response - list of current policy ids for that PDP

PDP compares list with policies currently held. Policies to be deleted
are noted.

2. PDP -> PAP Policy request - list of Policy Ids of policies to be
returned
2. PAP -> PDP Policy response - Returns Policies and Policy Sets. 

PAP is allowed to send subset of Policies requested. If a requested
policy does not exist, an error must be returned identify the Policy in
question. In this case, the PDP should go back to sending a request for
the current policy list.

PDP continues sending policy requests until all needed policies have
been received. Then the PDP stops evaluation, atomically adds new
policies and deletes obsolete ones, then resumes policy evaluation.



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