http://www.project-moonshot.org/.

Specifically,

http://www.project-moonshot.org/sites/default/files/moonshot-feasibility-analysis.pdf

and

http://www.project-moonshot.org/sites/default/files/moonshot-briefing-ietf-78.pdf

That briefing paper contains outdated versions of the technical
specifications.
Please see

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-abfab-arch-00

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-abfab-gss-eap

and http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-abfab-gss-eap-naming
and

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-abfab-aaa-saml

O, yeah, and for the totally cool stuff that is still being designed
please see

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-mrw-abfab-multihop-fed

and http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-mrw-abfab-trust-router

This code is still in the early stages. Padl has not decided how the code will be made available. We don’t know if it will be under an open-source license yet. Luke, naturally wants to get paid for his work. However if this code does get released under an open-source license, it will be very valuable. That will give all of us who are looking for a starting point for security innovations a starting point for bringing our innovations to Windows. Some in the open-source community will argue that we shouldn’t work on improving Windows: if the open-source platforms have features Windows does not, then it may drive people to open-source. Especially for enterprise infrastructure, it tends not to work that way. You need broad cross-platform support to drive new technology. However, it does mean that we can take control of the evolution of our infrastructure; even for Windows there is no requirement that a single vendor controls what is possible.

Since then, the project has picked up the momentum of last fall. There’s a new developers corner with helpful links for participating in the project, obtaining the code, and preparing for our upcoming Second Moonshot Meeting. Standards work in the ABFAB working group has been making steady progress the entire time.

The jabber chat room has been quite active. Developers have been working in three time zones. Whenever In get up there’s likely to be interesting progress awaiting me and new things to work on in the chat logs. Today was no exception. Luke moonshooted jabber. This is exciting: it’s the first tim our code has been used to authenticate some real application instead of a test service. Other discussion from the chat room not reflected in e-mail is equally exciting. He has Moonshot working with OpenSSH in controlled environments. It appears to require some updates to the OpenSSH GSS-API support.

Now is a really great time to get involved in Moonshot. We hope to see you on our lists and in our chat.

With last night’s news, we need to think towards eating our own dogfood and using Moonshot to authenticate to our own Jabber server and to authenticate to our repository for commits. Right now, there are some security issues with the code (lack of EAP channel binding) that might make that undesirable. However in a very small number of weeks or months I expect we will be there!

Unfortunately, getting the necessary legal clearance and agreements to release code often takes longer than anyone would like; that is what is happening here. We’re all eagerly awaiting final approval from the lawyers and JANET(UK) management. However, things have been moving behind the scenes. Throughout much of October, Luke Howard and Linus Nordberg were working on their respective parts of the code.

I’ve also been working on putting together the test and build infrastructure. As we discussed at the meeting, we’re going to use Debian and Ubuntu as the basis for our testing. For example, we hope to release virtual machine images for these platforms for the major Moonshot components. Thus the primary build environment for our testing and virtualization will be for Debian. I’ve been putting together that here. Right now, that branch will pull together packages of the SAML infrastructure that we need. I’ve also been looking into virtualized test frameworks and believe I’ve found one that meets our needs. I’ve also put together some primitive build infrastructure that is independent of packaging available here. I’ve set up a buildbot that builds both environments. So, as the code becomes available we’ll be in a good position to start making it available.

Most of the time was spent on two presentations. The first was the status of the GSS mechanism. We discussed issues that were discovered while implementing the EAP GSS-API mechanism. Discussion in the room tended to support the proposals made in the slides. A few issues will need to come to the list. We had the most interesting discussion of SAML AAA integration.

Minutes are available.

The new material was apropos for the venue. At the bar BOF back in March at IETF 77, we received several comments on Moonshot’s limitations. It doesn’t work well for services that require rapid authentications for multiple requests. There’s not a good story for use when a Moonshot service needs to contact another service. There isn’t a good standardized mechanism for mapping in domain-specific policy.

We presented a proposal that Luke and Sam developed to optionally provide a Kerberos ticket as part of moonshot authentication. This scales from a service that simply generates its own service tickets all the way through resource domains that have many services and complex policy and provide the client a TGT. Clients can implement the feature in order to achieve better performance. Server can implement the feature in order to get delegation support within a resource domain and to get policy mapping.

Luke has prototyped a version of this service involving a service ticket. We plan on briefly mentioning a desire to have extensible fast reauthentication support at the ABFAB meeting in IETF 79. However in the interest of getting the working group off to a good start we’re going to focus on the well understand parts of the system and formally propose this extension after IETF 79.

Meanwhile, at last month’s Moonshot meeting in Copenhagen, an initial version of the technology was demonstrated. We’re still working through some of the administrative details needed before we can release the code for public review. There have been several exciting discussions both on the Moonshot implementation list and on the ABFAB list over the past few weeks.