Taskforce Mobility Mailarchive


Subject Re: CUI reloaded
From stefan.winter@xxxxxxxxxx
Date Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:59:20 +0200

I would look at it in another way. "the Accounting packets MUST include
the CUI" - fine, but if there are NO accounting packets sent, then we
are not violating anything. And we have agreed some time ago that
sending accounting information to IdP makes little sense and in
addition violates user's privacy. Therefore I would not worry about it.
In the Telco setting this is different, as the IdP is interested in
billing the user and has the right to have the accounting information
(I guess), but as we gave no business gathering this information in
eduroam, it should not be sent by the SP in the first place.

If there is a reason to do Accounting, then indeed the CUI MUST be sent
and this definitely would be a problem. Still I would say DO NOT send
Accounting.

You're right that we don't have a striking need for accounting. Nevertheless it is the SPs decision to generate Accounting packets or not, so it would not be wise to ignore the fact that there *may* be Accounting packets floating around in our infrastructure. IIRC, there are even a few federations that make actual use of it. You don't want to state that when turning on CUI, everybody has to turn off Accounting, do you?

Also, accounting does have a few upsides even for us. If we had accounting throughout the infrastructure, we could have a more deterministic view on the number of *uses* of our infrastructure (and could move on from the unholy discussion that "number of successful authentications" is the only idea we've got). All those re-auths happening on the same user session could then be easily dissected into a single user session.

This is not a plea for accounting. It is a plea for not disregarding the possibility of existence of accounting packets.

Greetings,

Stefan

--
Tomasz Wolniewicz             twoln@xxxxxx
http://www.home.umk.pl/~twoln

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