Subject: [scim] WG Action: Formed System for Cross-domain Identity Management (scim)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 12:21:37 -0700

A new IETF working group has been formed in the Applications Area. For
additional information please contact the Area Directors or the WG
Chairs.

System for Cross-domain Identity Management (scim)
------------------------------------------------
Current Status: Active Working Group

Chairs:
  Morteza Ansari <[email-masked]>
  Leif Johansson <[email-masked]>

Assigned Area Director:
  Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>

Mailing list
  Address: [email-masked]
  To Subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/scim
  Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/scim/

Charter of Working Group:

The System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) working group
will standardize methods for creating, reading, searching, modifying,
and deleting user identities and identity-related objects across
administrative domains, with the goal of simplifying common tasks
related to user identity management in services and applications.

"Standardize" does not necessarily mean that the working group will
develop new technologies.  The existing specifications for "SCIM 1.0"
provide RESTful interfaces on top of HTTP rather than defining a new
application protocol.  That will be the basis for the new work.

Today, distributed identity management across administrative domains
is complicated by a lack of protocol and schema standardization
between consumers and producers of identities.  This has led to a
number of approaches, including error-prone manual administration and
bulk file uploads, as well as proprietary protocols and mediation
devices that must be adapted to each service for each organization.
While there is existing work in the field, it has not been widely
adopted for a variety of reasons, including a lack of common artifacts
such as schema, toolsets, and libraries.

The SCIM working group will develop the core schema and interfaces
based on HTTP and REST to address these problems.  Initially, the
group will focus on
- a schema definition
- a set of operations for creation, modification, and deletion of users
- schema discovery
- read and search
- bulk operations
- mapping between the inetOrgPerson LDAP object class (RFC 2798) and
 the SCIM schema

It will follow that by considering extensions for client targeting of
specific SCIM endpoints and SAML binding.  The approach will be
extensible.

The group will use, as starting points, the following drafts in the
following ways:
    draft-scim-use-cases-00 as the initial use cases for SCIM
    draft-scim-core-schema-00 as the schema specification
    draft-scim-api-00 as the protocol specification

These drafts are based on existing specifications, which together are
commonly known as SCIM 1.0.  Because there is existing work with
existing implementations, some consideration should be given to
backward compatibility, though getting it right takes priority.  This
group will consider the operational experience gathered from the
existing work, as well as experiences with work done by other bodies,
including the OASIS Provisioning TC.

The use cases document will be a "living document", guiding the
working group during its development of the standards.  The group may
take snapshots of that document for Informational publication, to
serve as documentation of the motivation for the work in progress
and to similarly guide planning and implementation.

The group will produce Proposed Standards for a schema, a REST-based
protocol, and a SAML binding, as well as an Informational document
defining an LDAP mapping. In doing so, the group will make the
terminology consistent, identify any functional gaps that would be
useful for future work, address internationalization, and provide
guidelines and mechanisms for extensibility.

In addition, the working group will ensure that the SCIM protocol
embodies good security practices. Given both the sensitivity of the
information being conveyed in SCIM messages and the regulatory
requirements regarding the privacy of personally identifiable
information, the working group will pay particular attention to issues
around authorization, authenticity, and privacy.

The group considers the following out of scope for this group:
    Defining new authentication schemes
    Defining new policy/authorization schemes

Milestones:
  Jun 2012 - Initial adoption of SCIM use cases, as a living document
  Jun 2012 - Initial adoption of SCIM core schema
  Aug 2012 - Initial adoption of SCIM restful interface draft
  Nov 2012 - Initial adoption of SCIM LDAP inetOrgPerson mapping draft
  Dec 2012 - Snapshot version of SCIM use cases to IESG as Informational
(possibly)
  Dec 2012 - Proposal for client targeting of SCIM endpoints
  Feb 2013 - SCIM core schema to IESG as Proposed Standard
  May 2013 - SCIM restful interface to IESG as Proposed Standard
  Jun 2013 - SCIM LDAP inetOrgPerson mapping to IESG as Informational
  Jul 2013 - Initial adoption of SCIM SAML bindings draft
  Aug 2013 - Client targeting of SCIM endpoints to IESG as Proposed
Standard
  Sep 2013 - Snapshot update of SCIM use cases as Informational
(possibly)
  Nov 2013 - SCIM SAML bindings to IESG as Proposed Standard
  Jan 2014 - Work completed; discuss re-charter

---

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 15:35:59 -0400

> System for Cross-domain Identity Management (scim)

Yay, and here we go.  The bug in the administrative tools has been
fixed, and the announcement is out.

As you can see, Morteza and Leif are your chairs, and you may contact
them with the <[email-masked]> alias (it might or might
not be working right now, but if it's not, it will be soon).  They'll
be posting here soon to get things moving.

We did make a session request for IETF 84 in Vancouver, so there will
be a session on the agenda for SCIM there.

Barry

---

From: Leif Johansson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 22:50:30 +0200

> As you can see, Morteza and Leif are your chairs, and you may
> contact them with the <[email-masked]> alias (it might
> or might not be working right now, but if it's not, it will be
> soon).  They'll be posting here soon to get things moving.
> 
> We did make a session request for IETF 84 in Vancouver, so there
> will be a session on the agenda for SCIM there.
> 
> Barry

Thanks Barry,

Morteza and me will be posting a draft agenda in the next few days. This
is the first time SCIM meets as a WG and we will devote a little bit of
time to re-cap and level-setting and then devote much of our time to
technical discussions.

	Best Leif & Morteza