RFC 3238 (rfc3238) - Page 3 of 17

IAB Architectural and Policy Considerations for Open Pluggable Edge Services

RFC 3238              IAB Considerations for OPES           January 2002


   the ability of end hosts to detect and respond to the inappropriate
   behavior of intermediaries could be applied to the architectures for
   web caches and content distribution infrastructures even without the
   additional complication of OPES.

   Each section of the document contains a set of IAB Considerations
   that we would recommend be addressed by the OPES architecture.
   Section 6 summarizes by listing all of these considerations in one
   place.

   In this document we try to use terminology consistent with RFC 3040
   [RFC 3040] and with OPES works in progress.

2.  Some history of the controversy about chartering OPES

   One view on OPES has been that "OPES is deeply evil and the IETF
   should stay far, far away from this hideous abomination" [ODell01].
   Others have suggested that "OPES would reduce both the integrity, and
   the perception of integrity, of communications over the Internet, and
   would significantly increase uncertainly about what might have been
   done to content as it moved through the network", and that therefore
   the risks of OPES outweigh the benefits [CDT01].  This view of the
   risks of OPES was revised in later email, based on the proposals from
   [Carr01], "assuming that certain privacy and integrity protections
   can be incorporated into the goals of the working group" [Morris01].

   One issue concerns the one-party consent model.  In the one-party
   consent model, one of the end-nodes (that is, either the content
   provider or the end user) is required to explicitly authorize the
   OPES service, but authorization is not required from both parties.
   [CDT01] comments that relying only on a one-party consent model in
   the OPES charter "could facilitate third-party or state-sponsored
   censorship of Internet content without the knowledge or consent of
   end users", among other undesirable scenarios.

   A natural first question is whether there is any architectural
   benefit to putting specific services inside the network (e.g., at the
   application-level web cache) instead of positioning all services
   either at the content provider or the end user.  (Note that we are
   asking here whether there is architectural benefit, which is not the
   same as asking if there is a business model.)  Client-centric
   services suggested for OPES include virus scanning, language
   translation, limited client bandwidth adaptation, request filtering,
   and adaptation of streaming media, and suggested server-centric
   services include location-based services and personalized web pages.






IAB                          Informational