Subject: [Syslog] Newly revised proposed charter

From: Chris Lonvick <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2005 17:38:42 -0800 (PST)

Hi All,

Sam has asked that we nail down one topic in our re-chartering effort: 
backwards compatibility. I'll propose the following modification to our 
Charter and I've also put in some Milestone dates below.

===

Syslog is a de-facto standard for logging system events.  However, the 
protocol component of this event logging system has not been formally 
documented.  While the protocol has been very useful and scalable, it has 
some known security problems which were documented in RFC 3164.

The goal of this working group is to address the security and integrity 
problems, and to standardize the syslog protocol, transport, and a select 
set of mechanisms in a manner that considers the ease of migration between 
and the co-existence of existing versions and the standard.

Reviews have shown that there are very few similarities between the 
message formats generated by heterogeneous systems.  In fact, the only 
consistent commonality between messages is that all of them contain the 
<PRI> at the start.  Additional testing has shown that as long as the 
<PRI> is present in a syslog message, all tested receivers will accept any 
generated message as a valid syslog message.  In designing a standard 
syslog message format, this Working Group will retain the <RPI> at the 
start of the message and will introduce protocol versioning.  Along these 
same lines, many different charsets have been used in syslog messages 
observed in the wild but no indication of the charset has been given in 
any message.  The Working Group also feels that multiple charsets will not 
be beneficial to the community; much code would be needed to distinguish 
and interpret different charsets.  For compatibility with existing 
implementations, the Working Group will allow that messages may still be 
sent that do not indicate the charset used.  However, the Working Group 
will recommend that messages contain a way to identify the charset used 
for the message, and will also recommend a single default charset.

syslog has traditionally been transported over UDP and this WG has already 
defined RFC 3195 for the reliable transport for the syslog messages.  The 
WG will separate the UDP transport from the protocol so that others may 
define additional transports in the future.

- A document will be produced that describes a standardized syslog
protocol.  A mechanism will also be defined in this document
that will provide a means to convey structured data.

- A document will be produced that describes a standardized UDP
transport for syslog.

- A document will be produced to describe the MIB for syslog entities.

- A document will be produced that describes a standardized mechanism
to sign syslog messages to provide integrity checking and source
authentication.

Milestones:

Mar 2006   Submit Syslog Protocol to IESG for consideration as a PROPOSED
            STANDARD
Mar 2006   Submit Syslog UDP Transport Mapping to IESG for consideration
            as a PROPOSED STANDARD.
Jul 2006   Submit Syslog Device MIB to IESG for consideration as a
            PROPOSED STANDARD
Jul 2006   Submit Syslog Authentication Protocol to IESG for consideration
            as a PROPOSED STANDARD.

===

Thoughts and comments please.

Thanks,
Chris

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---

From: "Tom Petch" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:03:27 +0100

I don't think this quite nails it down - see inline

Tom Petch

----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Lonvick" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2005 2:38 AM
Subject: [Syslog] Newly revised proposed charter
> start of the message and will introduce protocol versioning.

Yes but so what? I think you need to spell out the consequences with something
like.

Beyond that, the amount of backward compatability will perforce be limited.

<snip>