Policy Framework Working Group B. Moore INTERNET-DRAFT E. Ellesson Category: Standards Track IBM J. Strassner Cisco Systems May, 2000 Policy Core Information Model -- Version 1 Specification Wednesday, May 10, 2000, 1:36 PM Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000). All Rights Reserved. Abstract This document presents the object-oriented information model for representing policy information developed jointly in the IETF Policy Framework WG and as extensions to the Common Information Model (CIM) activity in the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). This model defines two hierarchies of object classes: structural classes representing policy information and control of policies, and association classes that indicate how instances of the structural classes are related to each other. Subsequent documents will define mappings of this information model to various concrete implementations, for example, to a directory that uses LDAPv3 as its access protocol. The components of the CIM v2.2 schema are available via the following URL: http://www.dmtf.org/spec/cim_schema_v22.html [1]. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 1] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 Table of Contents 1. Introduction......................................................4 2. Modeling Policies.................................................5 2.1. Policy Scope.................................................7 2.2. Declarative versus Procedural Model..........................8 3. Overview of the Policy Core Information Model....................10 4. Inheritance Hierarchies for the Core Policy Classes and Relationships.......................................................13 5. Details of the Model.............................................14 5.1. Reusable versus Rule-Specific Conditions and Actions........14 5.2. Roles.......................................................16 5.2.1. Roles, Subjects, and Targets..............................16 5.2.2. The PolicyRoles Property..................................19 5.3. Naming in the Policy Core Information Model.................19 5.3.1. Role of the CreationClassName Property in Naming..........20 5.3.2. Naming Instances of PolicyGroup and PolicyRule............20 5.3.3. Naming Instances of PolicyCondition and Its Subclasses....21 5.3.4. Naming Instances of PolicyAction and Its Subclasses.......23 5.3.5. Naming Instances of PolicyRepository......................23 5.4. Local Time and UTC Time in PolicyTimePeriodConditions.......23 5.5. CIM Data Types..............................................25 6. Class Definitions................................................25 6.1. The Abstract Class "Policy".................................26 6.1.1. The Property "CommonName (CN)"............................26 6.1.2. The Multi-valued Property "PolicyKeywords"................27 6.1.3. The Property "Caption"....................................27 6.1.4. The Property "Description"................................28 6.2. The Class "PolicyGroup".....................................28 6.2.1. The Propagated Key Property "CIM_System.CreationClassName"29 6.2.2. The Propagated Key Property "CIM_System.Name".............29 6.2.3. The Key Property "CreationClassName"......................30 6.2.4. The Key Property "PolicyGroupName"........................30 6.3. The Class "PolicyRule"......................................30 6.3.1. The Propagated Key Property "CIM_System.CreationClassName"32 6.3.2. The Propagated Key Property "CIM_System.Name".............32 6.3.3. The Key Property "CreationClassName"......................32 6.3.4. The Key Property "PolicyRuleName".........................32 6.3.5. The Property "Enabled"....................................33 6.3.6. The Property "ConditionListType"..........................33 6.3.7. The Property "RuleUsage"..................................33 6.3.8. The Property "Priority"...................................34 6.3.9. The Property "Mandatory"..................................34 6.3.10. The Property "SequencedActions"..........................34 6.3.11. The Multi-valued Property "PolicyRoles"..................35 6.4. The Class "PolicyCondition".................................35 6.4.1. The Key Property "SystemCreationClassName"................37 6.4.2. The Key Property "SystemName".............................38 6.4.3. The Key Property "PolicyRuleCreationClassName"............38 6.4.4. The Key Property "PolicyRuleName".........................39 6.4.5. The Key Property "CreationClassName"......................39 6.4.6. The Key Property "PolicyConditionName"....................39 Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 2] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 6.5. The Class "PolicyTimePeriodCondition".......................40 6.5.1. The Property "TimePeriod".................................41 6.5.2. The Property "MonthOfYearMask"............................42 6.5.3. The Property "DayOfMonthMask".............................43 6.5.4. The Property "DayOfWeekMask"..............................43 6.5.5. The Property "TimeOfDayMask"..............................44 6.5.6. The Property "LocalOrUtcTime".............................45 6.6. The Class "VendorPolicyCondition"...........................45 6.6.1. The Multi-valued Property "Constraint"....................46 6.6.2. The Property "ConstraintEncoding".........................46 6.7. The Class "PolicyAction"....................................47 6.7.1. The Key Property "SystemCreationClassName"................47 6.7.2. The Key Property "SystemName".............................48 6.7.3. The Key Property "PolicyRuleCreationClassName"............48 6.7.4. The Key Property "PolicyRuleName".........................49 6.7.5. The Key Property "CreationClassName"......................49 6.7.6. The Key Property "PolicyActionName".......................49 6.8. The Class "VendorPolicyAction"..............................50 6.8.1. The Multi-valued Property "ActionData"....................50 6.8.2. The Property "ActionEncoding".............................51 6.9. The Class "PolicyRepository"................................51 6.9.1. Naming an Instance of "PolicyRepository"..................51 7. Association and Aggregation Definitions..........................52 7.1. Associations................................................52 7.2. Aggregations................................................52 7.3. Object References...........................................52 7.4. The Aggregation "PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup"..................52 7.4.1. The Reference "ContainingGroup"...........................53 7.4.2. The Reference "ContainedGroup"............................53 7.5. The Aggregation "PolicyRuleInPolicyGroup"...................53 7.5.1. The Reference "ContainingGroup"...........................54 7.5.2. The Reference "ContainedRule".............................54 7.6. The Aggregation "PolicyConditionInPolicyRule"...............54 7.6.1. The Reference "ContainingRule"............................55 7.6.2. The Reference "ContainedCondition"........................55 7.6.3. The Property "GroupNumber"................................55 7.6.4. The Property "ConditionNegated"...........................55 7.7. The Association "PolicyConditionSubject"....................56 7.7.1. The Reference "Subject"...................................56 7.7.2. The Reference "Condition".................................56 7.8. The Association "PolicyConditionTarget".....................57 7.8.1. The Reference "Target"....................................57 7.8.2. The Reference "Condition".................................57 7.9. The Aggregation "PolicyRuleValidityPeriod"..................58 7.9.1. The Reference "ContainingRule"............................58 7.9.2. The Reference "ContainedPtp"..............................58 7.10. The Aggregation "PolicyActionInPolicyRule".................59 7.10.1. The Reference "ContainingRule"...........................59 7.10.2. The Reference "ContainedAction"..........................59 7.10.3. The Property "ActionOrder"...............................59 7.11. The Association "PolicyConditionInPolicyRepository"........60 7.11.1. The Reference "ContainingRepository".....................61 Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 3] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 7.11.2. The Reference "ContainedCondition".......................61 7.12. The Association "PolicyActionInPolicyRepository"...........61 7.12.1. The Reference "ContainingRepository".....................61 7.12.2. The Reference "ContainedAction"..........................62 7.13. The Weak Association "PolicyGroupInSystem".................62 7.13.1. The Reference "DefiningSystem"...........................62 7.13.2. The Reference "ScopedGroup"..............................62 7.14. The Weak Association "PolicyRuleInSystem"..................62 7.14.1. The Reference "DefiningSystem"...........................63 7.14.2. The Reference "ScopedRule"...............................63 7.15. The Aggregation "PolicyRepositoryInPolicyRepository".......63 7.15.1. The Reference "ContainingRepository".....................63 7.15.2. The Reference "ContainedRepository"......................64 8. Intellectual Property............................................64 9. Acknowledgements.................................................64 10. Security Considerations.........................................64 11. References......................................................66 12. Authors' Addresses..............................................67 13. Full Copyright Statement........................................68 1. Introduction This document presents the object-oriented information model for representing policy information currently under joint development in the IETF Policy Framework WG and as extensions to the Common Information Model (CIM) activity in the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). This model defines two hierarchies of object classes: structural classes representing policy information and control of policies, and association classes that indicate how instances of the structural classes are related to each other. Subsequent documents will define mappings of this information model to various concrete implementations, for example, to a directory that uses LDAPv3 as its access protocol. The policy classes and associations defined in this model are sufficiently generic to allow them to represent policies related to anything. However, it is expected that their initial application in the IETF will be for representing policies related to QoS (DiffServ and IntServ) and to IPSec. Policy models for application-specific areas such as these may extend the Core Model in several ways. The preferred way is to use the PolicyGroup, PolicyRule, and PolicyTimePeriodCondition classes directly, as a foundation for representing and communicating policy information. Then, specific subclasses derived from PolicyCondition and PolicyAction can capture application-specific definitions of conditions and actions of policies. Two subclasses, VendorPolicyCondition and VendorPolicyAction, are also included in this document, to provide a standard extension mechanism for vendor-specific extensions to the Policy Core Information Model. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 4] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 This document fits into the overall framework for representing, deploying, and managing policies being developed by the Policy Framework Working Group. It traces its origins to work that was originally done for the Directory-enabled Networks (DEN) specification, reference [5]. Work on the DEN specification by the DEN Ad-Hoc Working Group itself has been completed. Further work to standardize the models contained in it will be the responsibility of selected working groups of the CIM effort in the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). DMTF standardization of the core policy model is the responsibility of the SLA Policy working group in the DMTF. This document is organized in the following manner: o Section 2 provides a general overview of policies and how they are modeled. o Section 3 presents a high-level overview of the classes and associations comprising the Policy Core Information Model. o The remainder of the document presents the detailed specifications for each of the classes and associations. The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119, reference [3]. 2. Modeling Policies The classes comprising the Policy Core Information Model are intended to serve as an extensible class hierarchy (through specialization) for defining policy objects that enable application developers, network administrators, and policy administrators to represent policies of different types. One way to think of a policy-controlled network is to first model the network as a state machine and then use policy to control which state a policy-controlled device should be in or is allowed to be in at any given time. Given this approach, policy is applied using a set of policy rules. Each policy rule consists of a set of conditions and a set of actions. Policy rules may be aggregated into policy groups. These groups may be nested, to represent a hierarchy of policies. The set of conditions associated with a policy rule specifies when the policy rule is applicable. The set of conditions can be expressed as either an ORed set of ANDed sets of condition statements or an ANDed set of ORed sets of statements. Individual condition statements can also be negated. These combinations are termed, respectively, Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) and Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF) for the conditions. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 5] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 If the set of conditions associated with a policy rule evaluates to TRUE, then a set of actions that either maintain the current state of the object or transition the object to a new state may be executed. For the set of actions associated with a policy rule, it is possible to specify an order of execution, as well as an indication of whether the order is required or merely recommended. It is also possible to indicate that the order in which the actions are executed does not matter. Policy rules themselves can be prioritized. One common reason for doing this is to express an overall policy that has a general case with a few specific exceptions. For example, a general QoS policy rule might specify that traffic originating from members of the engineering group is to get Bronze Service. A second policy rule might express an exception: traffic originating from John, a specific member of the engineering group, is to get Gold Service. Since traffic originating from John satisfies the conditions of both policy rules, and since the actions associated with the two rules are incompatible, a priority needs to be established. By giving the second rule (the exception) a higher priority than the first rule (the general case), a policy administrator can get the desired effect: traffic originating from John gets Gold Service, and traffic originating from all the other members of the engineering group gets Bronze Service. Policies can either be used in a stand-alone fashion or aggregated into policy groups to perform more elaborate functions. Stand-alone policies are called policy rules. Policy groups are aggregations of policy rules, or aggregations of policy groups, but not both. Policy groups can model intricate interactions between objects that have complex interdependencies. Examples of this include a sophisticated user logon policy that sets up application access, security, and reconfigures network connections based on a combination of user identity, network location, logon method and time of day. A policy group represents a unit of reusability and manageability in that its management is handled by an identifiable group of administrators and its policy rules apply equally to the scope of the policy group. Stand-alone policies are those that can be expressed in a simple statement. They can be represented effectively in schemata or MIBs. Examples of this are VLAN assignments, simple YES/NO QoS requests, and IP address allocations. A specific design goal of this model is to support both stand-alone and aggregated policies. Policy groups and rules can be classified by their purpose and intent. This classification is useful in querying or grouping policy rules. It indicates whether the policy is used to motivate when or how an action occurs, or to characterize services (that can then be used, for example, to bind clients to network services). Describing each of these concepts in more detail, Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 6] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 o Motivational Policies are solely targeted at whether or how a policy's goal is accomplished. Configuration and Usage Policies are specific kinds of Motivational Policies. Another example is the scheduling of file backup based on disk write activity from 8am to 3pm, M-F. o Configuration Policies define the default (or generic) setup of a managed entity (for example, a network service). Examples of Configuration Policies are the setup of a network forwarding service or a network-hosted print queue. o Installation Policies define what can and cannot be put on a system or component, as well as the configuration of the mechanisms that perform the install. Installation policies typically represent specific administrative permissions, and can also represent dependencies between different components (e.g., to complete the installation of component A, components B and C must be previously successfully installed or uninstalled). o Error and Event Policies. For example, if a device fails between 8am and 9pm, call the system administrator, otherwise call the Help Desk. o Usage Policies control the selection and configuration of entities based on specific "usage" data. Configuration Policies can be modified or simply re-applied by Usage Policies. Examples of Usage Policies include upgrading network forwarding services after a user is verified to be a member of a "gold" service group, or reconfiguring a printer to be able to handle the next job in its queue. o Security Policies deal with verifying that the client is actually who the client purports to be, permitting or denying access to resources, selecting and applying appropriate authentication mechanisms, and performing accounting and auditing of resources. o Service Policies characterize network and other services (not use them). For example, all wide-area backbone interfaces shall use a specific type of queuing. Service policies describe services available in the network. Usage policies describe the particular binding of a client of the network to services available in the network. These categories are represented in the Policy Core Information Model by special values defined for the PolicyKeywords property of the abstract class Policy. 2.1. Policy Scope Policies represent business goals and objectives. A translation must be made between these goals and objectives and their realization in Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 7] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 the network. An example of this could be a Service Level Agreement (SLA), and its objectives and metrics (Service Level Objectives, or SLOs), that are used to specify services that the network will provide for a given client. The SLA will usually be written in high-level business terminology. SLOs address more specific metrics in support of the SLA. These high-level descriptions of network services and metrics must be translated into lower-level, but also vendor- and device- independent specifications. The Policy Core Information Model classes are intended to serve as the foundation for these vendor- and device- independent specifications. It is envisioned that the definition of the Policy Core Informational Model in this draft is generic in nature and is applicable to Quality of Service (QoS), to non-QoS networking applications (e.g., DHCP and IPSEC), and to non-networking applications (e.g., backup policies, auditing access, etc.). 2.2. Declarative versus Procedural Model The design of the Policy Core Information Model is influenced by a declarative, not procedural, approach. More formally, a declarative language is used to describe relational and functional languages. Declarative languages describe relationships between variables in terms of functions or inference rules, to which the interpreter or compiler can apply a fixed algorithm in order to produce a result. An imperative (or procedural) language specifies an explicit sequence of steps to follow in order to produce a result. It is important to note that this information model does not rule out the use of procedural languages. Rather, it recognizes that both declarative as well as procedural languages can be used to implement policy. This information model is better viewed as being declarative because the sequence of steps for doing the processing of declarative statements tends to be left to the implementer. However, we have provided the option of expressing the desired order of action execution in this policy information model, and for expressing whether the order is mandatory or not. In addition, rather than trying to define algorithms or sets of instructions or steps that must be followed by a policy rule, we instead define a set of modular building blocks and relationships that can be used in a declarative or procedural fashion to define policies. Compare this to a strictly procedural model. Taking such an approach would require that we specify the condition testing sequence, and the action execution sequence, in the policy repository itself. This would, indeed, constrain the implementer. This is why the policy model is characterized as a declarative one. That is, the information model defines a set of attributes, and a set of entities that contain these attributes. However, it does NOT define either the algorithm to produce a result using the attributes or an explicit sequence of steps to produce a result. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 8] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 There are several design considerations and trade-offs to make in this respect. 1. On the one hand, we would like a policy definition language to be reasonably human-friendly for ease of definitions and diagnostics. On the other hand, given the diversity of devices (in terms of their processing capabilities) which could act as policy decision points, we would like to keep the language somewhat machine- friendly. That is, it should be relatively simple to automate the parsing and processing of the language in network elements. The approach taken is to provide a set of classes and attributes that can be combined in either a declarative or procedural approach to express policies that manage network elements and services. The key point is to avoid trying to standardize rules or sets of steps to be followed in defining a policy. These must be left up to an implementation. Interoperability is achieved by standardizing the building blocks that are used to represent policy data and information. 2. An important decision to make is the semantic style of the representation of the information. The declarative approach that we are describing falls short of being a "true" declarative model. Such a model would also specify the algorithms used to combine the information and policy rules to achieve particular behavior. We avoid specifying algorithms for the same reason that we avoid specifying sets of steps to be followed in a policy rule. However, the design of the information model more closely follows that of a declarative language, and may be easier to understand if such a conceptual model is used. This leads to our third point, acknowledging a lack of "completeness" and instead relying on presenting information that the policy processing entity will work with. 3. It is important to control the complexity of the specification, trading off richness of expression of data in the core information model for ease of implementation and use. It is important to acknowledge the collective lack of experience in the field policies to control and manage network services and hence avoid the temptation of aiming for "completeness". We should instead strive to facilitate definition of a set of common policies that customers require today (e.g., VPN and QoS) and allow migration paths towards supporting complex policies as customer needs and our understanding of these policies evolve with experience. Specifically, in the context of the declarative style language discussed above, it is important to avoid having full blown predicate calculus as the language, as it would render many important problems such as consistency checking and policy decision point algorithms intractable. It is useful to consider a reasonably constrained language from these perspectives. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 9] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 The Policy Core Information Model strikes a balance between complexity and lack of power by using the well understood logical concepts of Disjunctive Normal Form and Conjunctive Normal Form for combining simple policy conditions into more complex ones. 3. Overview of the Policy Core Information Model The following diagram provides an overview of the five central classes comprising the Policy Core Information Model, their associations to each other, and their associations to other classes in the overall CIM model. Note that the abstract class Policy and the two extension classes VendorPolicyCondition and VendorPolicyAction are not shown. NOTE: For cardinalities, "*" is an abbreviation for "0..n". Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 10] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 +-----------+ |CIM_System | ..... +--^-----^--+ ..... . . 1. 1. . . *.(a).* .(b) .(c) *.(d).* +--v---v---------+ . . +-v---v------------+ | PolicyGroup <........ . | PolicyRepository | | | w * . | | +------^---------+ . +-----^---------^--+ *. . 0..1 . 0..1 . .(e) . .(f) .(g) *. . . . +------v------+ w * . . . | <................. . . | PolicyRule | . . | | . . | | . . | <........................ . . | |* (h) . . . | | . . . | | +----------------+ . . . | | | CIM_MSE | . . . | | +---^---------^--+ . . . | | .* .* . . . | | .(i) .(j) . . . | | . .* .* .* . | | . +--v------v-------v--+ . | | .......> PolicyCondition | . | | *+--------------------+ . | | (k) ^ . | <.............. I . | |* . I . | | .* ^ . | | +----v----------------------+ . | | | PolicyTimePeriodCondition | . | | +---------------------------+ . | | (l) . | <......................... . | |* . . | | .* . | | +----------v---------+* . | | | PolicyAction <....... +-------------+ +--------------------+ Figure 1. Overview of the Core Policy Classes and Relationships In this figure the boxes represent the classes, and the dotted arrows represent the associations. The following associations appear: (a) PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup (b) PolicyGroupInSystem Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 11] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 (c) PolicyRuleInSystem (d) PolicyRepositoryInPolicyRepository (e) PolicyRuleInPolicyGroup (f) PolicyConditionInPolicyRepository (g) PolicyActionInPolicyRepository (h) PolicyConditionInPolicyRule (i) PolicyConditionSubject (j) PolicyConditionTarget (k) PolicyRuleValidityPeriod (l) PolicyActionInPolicyRule An association always connects two classes. The "two" classes may, however, be the same class, as is the case with the PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup association, which represents the recursive containment of PolicyGroups in other PolicyGroups. The PolicyRepositoryInPolicyRepository association is recursive in the same way. An association has associated with it cardinalities for each of the related classes. These cardinalities indicate how many instances of each class may be related to an instance of the other class. For example, the PolicyRuleInPolicyGroup association has the cardinality range "*' (that is, "0..n") for both the PolicyGroup and PolicyRule classes. These ranges are interpreted as follows: o The "*" written next to PolicyGroup indicates that a PolicyRule may be related to no PolicyGroups, to one PolicyGroup, or to more than one PolicyGroup via the PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup association. In other words, a PolicyRule may be contained in no PolicyGroups, in one PolicyGroups, or in more than one PolicyGroup. o The "*" written next to PolicyRule indicates that a PolicyGroup may be related to no PolicyRules, to one PolicyRule, or to more than one PolicyRule via the PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup association. In other words, a PolicyGroup may contain no PolicyRules, one PolicyRule, or more than one PolicyRule. The "w" written next to the PolicyGroupInSystem and PolicyRuleInSystem indicates that these are what CIM terms "aggregations with weak references", or more briefly, "weak aggregations." A weak aggregation is simply an indication of a naming scope. Thus these two aggregations indicate that an instance of a PolicyGroup or PolicyRule Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 12] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 is named within the scope of a CIM_System object. A weak aggregation implicitly has the cardinality 1..1 at the end opposite the 'w'. The associations shown in Figure 1 are discussed in more detail in Section 7. 4. Inheritance Hierarchies for the Core Policy Classes and Relationships The following diagram illustrates the inheritance hierarchy for the core policy classes: [unrooted] | +--Policy (abstract) | | | +---PolicyGroup | | | +---PolicyRule | | | +---PolicyCondition | | | | | +---PolicyTimePeriodCondition | | | | | +---VendorPolicyCondition | | | +---PolicyAction | | | +---VendorPolicyAction | +--CIM_ManagedSystemElement (abstract) | +--CIM_LogicalElement (abstract) | +--CIM_System (abstract) | +---CIM_AdminDomain (abstract) | +---PolicyRepository Figure 2. Inheritance Hierarchy for the Core Policy Classes The four abstract CIM classes from which PolicyRepository is derived are defined in the CIM v2.2 schema [1]. These classes are not discussed in detail in this document. In CIM, associations are also modeled as classes. For the Policy Core Information Model, the inheritance hierarchy for the associations has only a single level: Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 13] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 [unrooted] | +---PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup | +---PolicyRuleInPolicyGroup | +---PolicyGroupInSystem | +---PolicyRuleInSystem | +---PolicyConditionInPolicyRule | +---PolicyConditionSubject | +---PolicyConditionTarget | +---PolicyRuleValidityPeriod | +---PolicyActionInPolicyRule | +---PolicyConditionInPolicyRepository | +---PolicyActionInPolicyRepository | +---PolicyRepositoryInPolicyRepository Figure 3. Inheritance Hierarchy for the Core Policy Relationships 5. Details of the Model The following subsections discuss several specific issues related to the CIM Core Policy model. 5.1. Reusable versus Rule-Specific Conditions and Actions Policy conditions and policy actions can be partitioned into two groups: ones associated with a single policy rule, and ones that are reusable, in the sense that they may be associated with more than one policy rule. Conditions and actions in the first group are termed "rule-specific" conditions and actions; those in the second group are characterized as "reusable". It is important to understand that the difference between a rule- specific condition or action and a reusable one is based on the intent of the policy administrator for the condition or action, rather than on the current associations in which the condition or action participates. Thus a reusable condition or action (that is, one that a policy administrator has created to be reusable) may at some point in time be associated with exactly one policy rule, without thereby becoming rule-specific. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 14] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 There is no inherent difference between a rule-specific condition or action and a reusable one. There are, however, differences in how they are treated in a policy repository. For example, it's natural to make the access permissions for a rule-specific condition or action identical to those for the rule itself. It's also natural for a rule- specific condition or action to be removed from the policy repository at the same time the rule is. With reusable conditions and actions, on the other hand, access permissions and existence criteria must be expressible without reference to a policy rule. The preceding paragraph does not contain an exhaustive list of the ways in which reusable and rule-specific conditions should be treated differently. Its purpose is merely to justify making a semantic distinction between rule-specific and reusable, and then reflecting this distinction in the policy repository itself. Another issue is highlighted by reusable and rule-specific policy conditions and policy actions: the lack of a capability in CIM for expressing complex constraints involving multiple associations. Taking PolicyCondition as an example, there are two aggregations to look at. PolicyConditionInPolicyRule has the cardinality * at both ends, and PolicyConditionInPolicyRepository has the cardinality * at the PolicyCondition end, and [0..1] at the PolicyRepository end. Globally, these cardinalities are correct. However, there's more to the story, which only becomes clear if we examine the cardinalities separately for the two cases of a rule-specific PolicyCondition and a reusable one. For a rule-specific PolicyCondition, the cardinality of PolicyConditionInPolicyRule at the PolicyRule end is [1..1], rather than [0..n] (recall that * is an abbreviation for [0..n]), since the condition is unique to one policy rule. And the cardinality of PolicyConditionInPolicyRepository at the PolicyRepository end is [0..0]. This is OK, since these are both subsets of the specified cardinalities. For a reusable PolicyCondition, however, the cardinality of PolicyConditionInPolicyRepository at the PolicyRepository end is [1..1], and that of the PolicyConditionInPolicyRule at the PolicyRule end is [0..n]. This last point is important: a reusable PolicyCondition may be associated with 0, 1, or more than 1 PolicyRules, via exactly the same association PolicyConditionInPolicyRule that supports manual propagation of key values (from a single PolicyRule) in the case of a rule-specific PolicyCondition. But the reusable PolicyCondition gets its key values via a different association, PolicyConditionInPolicyRepository. Currently the only way to document constraints of this type in CIM is textually. People in the DMTF are beginning to think about how CIM might be extended to accommodate more formal methods for documenting complex constraints. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 15] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 5.2. Roles 5.2.1. Roles, Subjects, and Targets The concept of role is central to the design of the entire Policy Framework. The idea behind roles is a simple one. Rather than configuring, and then later having to update the configuration of, hundreds or thousands (or more) of resources in a network, a policy administrator assigns each resource to one or more roles, and then specifies the policies for each of these roles. The Policy Framework is then responsible for configuring each of the resources associated with a role in such a way that it behaves according to the policies specified for that role. When network behavior must be changed, the policy administrator can perform a single update to the policy for a role, and the Policy Framework will ensure that the necessary configuration updates are performed on all the resources playing that role. A more formal definition of a role is as follows: A role is a type of attribute that is used to select one or more policies for a set of entities and/or components from among a much larger set of available policies. Similarly, here is a more formal definition of a "role-combination": A role-combination is a set of attributes that are used to select one or more policies for a set of entities and/or components from among a much larger set of available policies. As the examples below illustrate, the selection process for a role combination chooses policies associated with the combination itself, policies associated with each of its sub-combinations, and policies associated with each of the individual roles in the role- combination. It is important to note that a role is more than an attribute. A role defines a particular function of an entity or component that can be used to identify particular behavior associated with that entity or component. This difference is critical, and is most easily understood by thinking of a role as a selector. When used in this manner, one role (or role-combination) selects a different set of policies than a different role (or role-combination) does. Roles and role-combinations are especially useful in selecting which policies are applicable to a particular set of entities or components when the policy repository can store thousands or hundreds of thousands of policies. This use emphasizes the ability of the role (or role-combination) to select the small subset of policies that are applicable from a huge set of policies that are available. An example will illustrate how role-combinations actually work. Suppose an installation has three roles defined for interfaces: Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 16] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 "Ethernet", "Campus", and "WAN". In the Policy Repository, some policy rules could be associated with the role "Ethernet"; these rules would apply to all Ethernet interfaces, regardless of whether they were on the campus side or the WAN side. Other rules could be associated with the role-combination "Campus"+"Ethernet"; these rules would apply to the campus-side Ethernet interfaces, but not to those on the WAN side. Finally, a third set of rules could be associated with the role-combination "Ethernet"+"WAN"; these rules would apply to the WAN-side Ethernet interfaces, but not to those on the campus side. (The roles in a role-combination appear in alphabetical order in these examples, because that is how they appear in the information model.) If we have a specific interface A that's associated with the role- combination "Ethernet"+"WAN", we see that it should have three categories of policy rules applied to it: those for the "Ethernet" role, those for the "WAN" role, and those for the role-combination "Ethernet"+"WAN". Going one step further, if interface B is associated with the role-combination "branch-office"+"Ethernet"+"WAN", then B should have seven categories of policy rules applied to it - those associated with the following role-combinations: o "branch-office" o "Ethernet" o "WAN" o "branch-office"+"Ethernet" o "branch-office"+"WAN" o "Ethernet"+"WAN" o "branch-office"+"Ethernet"+"WAN". In order to get all of the right policy rules for a resource like interface B, a PDP must expand the single role-combination it receives for B into this list of seven role-combinations, and then retrieve from the Policy Repository the corresponding seven sets of policy rules. Of course this example is unusually complicated: the normal case will involve expanding a two-role combination into three values identifying three sets of policy rules. Role-combinations also help to simplify somewhat the problem of identifying conflicts between policy rules. With role-combinations, it is possible for a policy adminstrator to specify one set of policy rules for campus-side Ethernet interfaces, and a second set of policy rules for WAN-side Ethernet interfaces, without having to worry about conflicts between the two sets of rules. The policy adminstrator simply "turns off" conflict detection for these two sets of rules, by telling the policy management system that the roles "Campus" and "WAN" are incompatible with each other. In some cases the technology itself might identify incompatible roles: "Ethernet" and "FrameRelay", for example. But for less precise terms like "Campus" and "WAN", the policy adminstrator must say whether they identify incompatible roles. When the policy adminstrator does this, there are three effects: Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 17] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 1. If an interface has assigned to it a role-combination involving both "Campus" and "WAN", then the policy management system can flag it as an error. 2. If a policy rule is associated with a role-combination involving both "Campus" and "WAN", then the policy management system can flag it as an error. 3. If the policy management system sees two policy rules, where one is tied to the role "Campus" (or to a role-combination that includes the role "Campus") and the other is tied to the role "WAN" (or to a role-combination that includes the role "WAN"), then the system does not need to look for conflicts between the two policy rules: because of the incompatible roles, the two rules cannot possibly conflict. +-------------------+ | Policy Repository | +-------------------+ V V retrieval of policy V +---------+ | PDP/PEP | +---------+ v v application of policy v +----------------+ v +---------------+ | Policy Subject |ooooooo| Policy Target | +----------------+ +---------------+ Figure 4. Retrieval and Application of a Policy Figure 4, which is introduced only as an example of how the Policy Framework might be implemented by a collection of network components, illustrates how roles and two concepts closely related to roles, the policy subject and the policy target, operate within the Policy Framework. Because the distinction between them is not important to this discussion, the PDP and the PEP are combined in one box. The points illustrated here apply equally well, though, to an environment where the PDP and the PEP are implemented separately. A role represents a capability that operates at the point where a policy is applied. Examples of roles include Frame Relay interface, BGP-capable router, web server, and firewall. Roles may also be combined to form role combinations. Roles and role combinations are represented in the PCIM by values of the PolicyRoles property in the PolicyRule class. A PDP uses policy roles as follows to identify the policies it needs to be aware of: Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 18] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 1. The PDP learns in some way the list of roles that its PEPs play. This information might be configured at the PDP, the PEPs might supply it to the PDP, or the PDP might retrieve it from a repository. 2. Using repository-specific means, the PDP determines where to look for policy rules that might apply to it. 3. Using the roles and role-combinations it received from its PEPs as indicated in the examples above, the PDP is able to locate and retrieve the policy rules that are relevant to it. A policy itself is often, but not always, expressed in terms of a subject and a target. When a policy rule does involve a subject and a target, they are represented in policy conditions: IF ((subject = S) AND (target = T)) THEN (list of actions to be performed). 5.2.2. The PolicyRoles Property As indicated earlier, PolicyRoles is a property associated with a policy rule. Using this property, it is possible to mark a policy rule as applying, for example, to a Frame Relay interface or to a backbone ATM interface. The PolicyRoles property take strings of the form: [&&]* Each value of this property represents a role combination, including the special case of a "combination" containing only one role. As the format indicates, the role names in a role combination are ANDed together to form a single selector. The multiple values of the PolicyRoles property are logically ORed, to make it possible for a policy rule to have multiple selectors. The individual role names in a role combination must appear in alphabetical order (according to the collating sequence for UCS-2 characters), to make the string matches work correctly. The role names used in an environment are specified by the policy administrator. 5.3. Naming in the Policy Core Information Model While the CommonName property is present in the abstract superclass Policy, and is thus available in all of its instantiable subclasses, the Policy Core Information Model does not use this property for naming instances. The following subsections discuss how naming is handled in each of the instantiable classes in the Policy Core Information Model. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 19] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 5.3.1. Role of the CreationClassName Property in Naming To provide for more flexibility in instance naming, CIM makes use of a property called CreationClassName. The idea of CreationClassName is to provide another dimension that can be used to avoid naming collisions, in the specific case of instances belonging to two different subclasses of a common superclass. An example will illustrate how CreationClassName works. Suppose we have instances of two different subclasses of PolicyCondition, FrameRelayPolicyCondition and BgpPolicyCondition, and that these instances apply to the same context. If we had only the single key property PolicyConditionName available for distinguishing the two instances, then a collision would result from naming both of the instances with the key value PCName = "PC-1". Thus policy administrators from widely different disciplines would have to coordinate their naming of PolicyConditions for this context. With CreationClassName, collisions of this type can be eliminated, without requiring coordination among the policy administrators. The two instances can be distinguished by giving their CreationClassNames different values. One instance is now identified with the two keys CreationClassName = "FrameRelayPolicyCondition" + PCName = "PC-1", while the other is identified with CreationClassName = "BgpPolicyCondition" + PCName = "PC-1". In CIM, CreationClassName cannot always provide the naming flexibility illustrated by this example. An implementation may elect to return, as the value of CreationClassName, the name of the instantiable class HIGHEST in the inheritance hierarchy for an object, rather than the name of the most refined class. In the example, such an implementation would use "PolicyCondition" as the value for CreationClassName in both the Frame Relay policy condition and the BGP policy condition. These two policy condition objects would thus have to return different values for their other key property PolicyConditionName in order to be uniquely identifiable. Each of the instantiable classes in the Core Model includes the CreationClassName property as a key in addition to its own class- specific key property. 5.3.2. Naming Instances of PolicyGroup and PolicyRule A policy group always exists in some context. In the Policy Core Information Model, this contextual character of a policy group is captured by the weak aggregation PolicyGroupInSystem between a PolicyGroup and a CIM_System. When a CIM association is specified as "weak", this is a statement about naming scopes: an instance of the class at the weak end of the association is named within the scope of Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 20] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 an instance of the class at the other end of the association. This is accomplished by propagation of keys from the instance of the scoping class to the instance of the weak class. Thus the weak class has, via propagation, all the keys from the scoping class, and it also has one or more additional keys (unless the weak class is abstract) for distinguishing instances of the weak class named within the scope of the same instance of the scoping class. A policy rule must also exist in some context. In the Policy Core Information Model, this contextual character of a policy rule is captured by the weak association PolicyRuleInSystem between a PolicyRule and a CIM_System. Note that CIM_System serves as the base class for describing network devices. 5.3.3. Naming Instances of PolicyCondition and Its Subclasses As indicated above in Section 5.1, the single class PolicyCondition is used to represent both reusable and rule-specific policy conditions. The distinction between the two types of policy conditions lies in the associations that different instances of PolicyCondition participate in, and in how the different instances are named. Conceptually, a reusable policy condition resides in a policy repository, and is named within the scope of that repository. On the other hand, a rule- specific policy condition is, as the name suggests, named within the scope of the single policy rule to which it is related. Naming scopes are represented in CIM by means of weak associations. However, CIM has the restriction that a given class can only participate at the weak end of one weak association. Another way of expressing the restriction is to say that all instances of a given class must be named within the scope of the same class (or in the scope of no class at all, if they are named directly in the global CIM name space). Clearly, then, the CIM naming architecture is not capable of expressing what we need it to express: that a given PolicyCondition instance is named EITHER in the scope of a policy rule (if it is a rule-specific condition) OR in the scope of a policy repository (if it is a reusable one). To work around this restriction (which may be removed in a future version of CIM), it is necessary to "simulate" weak associations between PolicyCondition and PolicyRule and between PolicyCondition and PolicyRepository, through a technique we'll call manual key propagation. Strictly speaking, manual key propagation isn't key propagation at all. But it has the same effect as (true) key propagation, so the name fits. Figure 5 illustrates how manual propagation works in the case of PolicyCondition; note that only the key properties are shown for each of the classes. In the figure, the line composed of 'I's indicates class inheritance, the one composed of 'P's indicates (true) key Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 21] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 propagation via the weak aggregation PolicyRuleInSystem, and the ones composed of 'M's indicate manual key propagation. +------------------+ | CIM_System | +------------------+ |CreationClassName | |Name | +------------------+ ^ P I PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP I P +------------------+ +---------------v--------------+ | CIM_AdminDomain | | PolicyRule | +------------------+ +------------------------------+ |CreationClassName | | CIM_System.CreationClassName | |Name | | CIM_System.Name | +------------------+ | CreationClassName | ^ | PolicyRuleName | I +------------------------------+ I M I M +------------------+ M | PolicyRepository | M +------------------+ M |CreationClassName | M |Name | M +------------------+ M M M M(*) M M M +----v-------------------v----+ | PolicyCondition | +-----------------------------+ | SystemCreationClassName | | SystemName | | PolicyRuleCreationClassName | | PolicyRuleName | | CreationClassName | | PolicyConditionName | +-----------------------------+ (*) Note that as part of this manual propagation, the special string "No Rule" is assigned to the PolicyRuleCreationClassName and PolicyRuleName properties. Figure 5. Manual Key Propagation for Naming PolicyConditions Looking at Figure 5, we see that two key properties CreationClassName and Name are defined in the CIM_System class, and inherited by its subclasses CIM_AdminDomain and PolicyRepository. Since PolicyRule is Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 22] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 weak to CIM_System, these two keys are propagated to it; it also has its own keys CreationClassName and PolicyRuleName. The "dot" notation (for example, "CIM_System.Name") indicates that CreationClassName and Name are keys that have been propagated from the class CIM_System into the class PolicyRule. The manual propagation of keys from PolicyRule to PolicyCondition involves copying the values of PolicyRule's four key properties into four similarly named key properties in PolicyCondition. Note, though, that the "dot" notation is absent: PolicyCondition's second key property is "SystemName", not "CIM_System.Name". So from the point of view of the CIM specification language, the property SystemName in PolicyCondition is a completely new key property: the relationship to the Name property in CIM_System is buried in the description of SystemName. The manual propagation of keys from PolicyRepository to PolicyCondition works in exactly the same way for the first two key properties. Since, however, PolicyRepository doesn't have [PolicyRule's] CreationClassName and PolicyRuleName as its third and fourth key properties, there are no values to copy into the PolicyRuleCreationClassName and PolicyRuleName key properties in PolicyCondition. A special value, "No Rule", is assigned to both of these properties in this case, indicating that this instance of PolicyCondition is not named within the scope of any particular policy rule. This matches the semantics of a reusable policy condition, which exists and is identified independent of any associations it might have with specific policy rules. 5.3.4. Naming Instances of PolicyAction and Its Subclasses From the point of view of naming, the PolicyAction class and its subclasses work exactly like the PolicyCondition class and its subclasses. See Section 5.3.3 for details. 5.3.5. Naming Instances of PolicyRepository Instances of PolicyRepository are named directly in the global CIM name space, using the CreationClassName and Name properties that PolicyRepository inherits from CIM_System. 5.4. Local Time and UTC Time in PolicyTimePeriodConditions An instance of PolicyTimePeriodCondition has up to five properties that represent times: TimePeriod, MonthOfYearMask, DayOfMonthMask, DayOfWeekMask, and TimeOfDayMask. All of the time-related properties in an instance of PolicyTimePeriodCondition represent one of two types of times: local time at the place where a policy rule is applied, or UTC time. The property LocalOrUtcTime indicates which time representation applies to an instance of PolicyTimePeriodCondition. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 23] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 Since the PCIM provides only for local time and UTC time, a Policy Management Tool that provides for other time representations (for example, a fixed time at a particular location) will need to map from these other representations to either local time or UTC time. An example will illustrate the nature of this mapping. Suppose a policy rule is tied to the hours of operation for a Help Desk: 0800 to 2000 Monday through Friday [US] Eastern Time. In order to express these times in PolicyTimePeriodCondition, a management tool must convert them to UTC times. (They are not local times, because they refer to a single time interval worldwide, not to intervals tied to the local clocks at the locations where the PolicyRule is being applied.) As reference [10] points out, mapping from [US] Eastern Time to UTC time is not simply a matter of applying an offset: the offset between [US] Eastern Time and UTC time switches between -0500 and -0400 depending on whether Daylight Savings Time is in effect in the US. Suppose the policy administrator's goal is to have a policy rule be valid from 0800 until 1200 [US] Eastern Time on every Monday, within the overall time period from the beginning of 2000 until the end of 2001. The Policy Management Tool could either be configured with the definition of what [US] Eastern Time means, or it could be configured with knowledge of where to go to get this information. Reference [10] contains further discussion of time zone definitions and where they might reside. Armed with knowledge about [US] Eastern Time, the Policy Management Tool would create however many instances of PolicyTimePeriodCondition it needed to represent the desired intervals. Note that while there is an increased number of PolicyTimePeriodCondition instances, there is still just one PolicyRule, which is tied to all the PolicyTimePeriodCondition instances via the aggregation PolicyRuleValidityPeriod. Here are the first two of these instances: 1. TimePeriod: 20000101T050000/20000402T070000 DayOfWeekMask: { Monday } TimeOfDayMask: T130000/T170000 LocalOrUtcTime: UTC 2. TimePeriod: 20000402T070000/20001029T070000 DayOfWeekMask: { Monday } TimeOfDayMask: T120000/T160000 LocalOrUtcTime: UTC There would be three more similar instances, for winter 2000-2001, summer 2001, and winter 2001 up through December 31. Had the example been chosen differently, there could have been even more instances of PolicyTimePeriodCondition. If, for example, the Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 24] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 time interval had been from 0800 - 2200 [US] Eastern Time on Mondays, instance 1 above would have split into two instances: one with a UTC time interval of T130000/T240000 on Mondays, and another with a UTC time interval of T000000/T030000 on Tuesdays. So the end result would have been ten instances of PolicyTimePeriodCondition, not five. By restricting PolicyTimePeriodCondition to local time and UTC time, the PCIM places the difficult and expensive task of mapping from "human" time representations to machine-friendly ones in the Policy Management Tool. Another approach would have been to place in PolicyTimePeriodCondition a means of representing a named time zone, such as [US] Eastern Time. This, however, would have passed the difficult mapping responsibility down to the PDPs and PEPs. It is better to have a mapping such as the one described above done once in a Policy Management Tool, rather than having it done over and over in each of the PDPs (and possibly PEPs) that need to apply a PolicyRule. 5.5. CIM Data Types The following CIM data types are used in the class definitions that follow in Sections 6 and 7: o uint8 unsigned 8-bit integer o uint16 unsigned 16-bit integer o boolean Boolean o string UCS-2 string. Strings in CIM are stored as UCS-2 characters, where each character is encoded in two octets. Thus string values may need to be converted when moving between a CIM environment and one that uses a different string encoding. For example, in an LDAP-accessible directory, attributes of type DirectoryString are stored in UTF-8 format. RFC 2279 [7] explains how to convert between these two formats. When it is applied to a CIM string, a MaxLen value refers to the maximum number of characters in the string, rather than to the maximum number of octets. In addition to the CIM data types listed above, the association classes in Section 7 use the following type: o ref strongly typed reference. 6. Class Definitions There are a significant number of differences between CIM and LDAP class specifications. The ones that are relevant to the abbreviated class specifications in this document are the following: Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 25] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 o Instead of LDAP's three class types (abstract, auxiliary, structural), CIM has only two: abstract and instantiable. The type of a CIM class is indicated by the Boolean qualifier ABSTRACT. o CIM uses the term "property" for what LDAP terms an "attribute". o CIM uses the array notation "[ ]" to indicate that a property is multi-valued. CIM defines three types of arrays: bags (contents are unordered, duplicates allowed), ordered bags (contents are ordered but duplicates are allowed) and indexed arrays (contents are ordered and no duplicates are allowed). o There is no distinction in a CIM class between mandatory and optional properties. Aside from the key properties (designated for naming instances of the class), all properties are optional. o CIM classes and properties are identified by name, not by OID. o In LDAP, attribute definitions are global, and the same attribute may appear in multiple classes. In CIM, a property is defined within the scope of a single class definition. The property may be inherited into subclasses of the class in which it is defined, but otherwise it cannot appear in other classes. One side effect of this difference is that CIM property names tend to be much shorter than LDAP attribute names, since they are implicitly scoped by the name of the class in which they are defined. For the complete definition of the CIM specification language, see reference [2]. 6.1. The Abstract Class "Policy" The abstract class Policy collects several properties that may be included in instances of any of the Core Policy classes (or their subclasses). The class definition is as follows: NAME Policy DESCRIPTION An abstract class with four properties for describing a policy-related instance. DERIVED FROM Top ABSTRACT TRUE PROPERTIES CommonName (CN) PolicyKeywords[ ] Caption Description 6.1.1. The Property "CommonName (CN)" The CN, or CommonName, property corresponds to the X.500 attribute commonName (cn). In X.500 this property specifies one or more user- Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 26] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 friendly names (typically only one name) by which an object is commonly known, names that conform to the naming conventions of the country or culture with which the object is associated. In the CIM model, however, the CommonName property is single-valued. NAME CN DESCRIPTION A user-friendly name of a policy-related object. SYNTAX string 6.1.2. The Multi-valued Property "PolicyKeywords" This property provides a set of one or more keywords that a policy administrator may use to assist in characterizing or categorizing a policy object. Keywords are of one of two types: o Keywords defined in this document, or in documents that define subclasses of the classes defined in this document. These keywords provide a vendor-independent, installation-independent way of characterizing policy objects. o Installation-dependent keywords for characterizing policy objects. Examples include "Engineering", "Billing", and "Review in December 2000". This document defines the following keywords: "UNKNOWN", "CONFIGURATION", "USAGE", "SECURITY", "SERVICE", "MOTIVATIONAL", "INSTALLATION", and "EVENT". These concepts were defined earlier in Section 2. One additional keyword is defined: "POLICY". The role of this keyword is to identify policy-related instances that would not otherwise be identifiable as being related to policy. Documents that define subclasses of the Policy Core Information Model classes SHOULD define additional keywords to characterize instances of these subclasses. By convention, keywords defined in conjunction with class definitions are in uppercase. Installation-defined keywords can be in any case. The property definition is as follows: NAME PolicyKeywords DESCRIPTION A set of keywords for characterizing /categorizing policy objects. SYNTAX string 6.1.3. The Property "Caption" This property provides a one-line description of a policy-related CIM object. NAME Caption Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 27] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 DESCRIPTION A one-line description of this policy-related object. SYNTAX string 6.1.4. The Property "Description" This property provides a longer description than that provided by the caption property. NAME Description DESCRIPTION A long description of this policy-related object. SYNTAX string 6.2. The Class "PolicyGroup" This class is a generalized aggregation container. It enables either PolicyRules or PolicyGroups, but not both, to be aggregated in a single container. Loops, including the degenerate case of a PolicyGroup that contains itself, are not allowed when PolicyGroups contain other PolicyGroups. PolicyGroups and their nesting capabilities are shown in Figure 6 below. Note that a PolicyGroup can nest other PolicyGroups, and there is no restriction on the depth of the nesting in sibling PolicyGroups. +---------------------------------------------------+ | PolicyGroup | | | | +--------------------+ +-----------------+ | | | PolicyGroup A | | PolicyGroup X | | | | | | | | | | +----------------+ | ooo | | | | | | PolicyGroup A1 | | | | | | | +----------------+ | | | | | +--------------------+ +-----------------+ | +---------------------------------------------------+ Figure 6. Overview of the PolicyGroup class As a simple example, think of the highest level PolicyGroup shown in Figure 6 above as a logon policy for US employees of a company. This PolicyGroup may be called USEmployeeLogonPolicy, and may aggregate several PolicyGroups that provide specialized rules per location. Hence, PolicyGroup A in Figure 6 above may define logon rules for employees on the West Coast, while another PolicyGroup might define logon rules for the Midwest (e.g., PolicyGroup X), and so forth. Note also that the depth of each PolicyGroup does not need to be the same. Thus, the WestCoast PolicyGroup might have several additional layers of PolicyGroups defined for any of several reasons (different locales, number of subnets, etc.). The PolicyRules are therefore contained at n levels from the USEmployeeLogonPolicyGroup. Compare Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 28] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 this to the Midwest PolicyGroup (PolicyGroup X), which might directly contain PolicyRules. The class definition for PolicyGroup is as follows: NAME PolicyGroup DESCRIPTION A container for either a set of related PolicyRules or a set of related PolicyGroups. DERIVED FROM Policy ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES CIM_System.CreationClassName[key] CIM_System.Name[key] CreationClassName[key] PolicyGroupName[key] 6.2.1. The Propagated Key Property "CIM_System.CreationClassName" This property represents the name of the CIM class to which the CIM_System object providing the naming scope for this instance of PolicyGroup belongs. Reference [1] defines this property as follows: NAME CIM_System.CreationClassName DESCRIPTION CreationClassName indicates the name of the class or the subclass used in the creation of an instance. When used with the other key properties of this class, this property allows all instances of this class and its subclasses to be uniquely identified. SYNTAX string[MaxLen 256] QUALIFIER key Class names in CIM are limited to alphabetic and numeric characters plus the underscore, with the restriction that the first character cannot be numeric. Refer to Appendix F "Unicode Usage" in reference [2] for an exact specification of how CIM class names are encoded in CIM strings. 6.2.2. The Propagated Key Property "CIM_System.Name" This property represents the name of the particular CIM_System object providing the naming scope for this instance of PolicyGroup. Reference [1] defines this property as follows: NAME CIM_System.Name DESCRIPTION The inherited Name serves as key of a System instance in an enterprise environment. SYNTAX string[MaxLen 256] QUALIFIER key Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 29] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 6.2.3. The Key Property "CreationClassName" This property identifies the class or subclass used in the creation of this instance. NAME CreationClassName DESCRIPTION The name of the class or subclass used in the creation of this instance. SYNTAX string[MaxLen 256] QUALIFIER key 6.2.4. The Key Property "PolicyGroupName" This property provides a user-friendly name for a policy group, and is normally what will be displayed to the end-user as the instance name. It is defined as follows: NAME PolicyGroupName DESCRIPTION The user-friendly name of this policy group. SYNTAX string QUALIFIER key 6.3. The Class "PolicyRule" This class represents the "If Condition then Action" semantics associated with a policy. A PolicyRule condition, in the most general sense, is represented as either an ORed set of ANDed conditions (Disjunctive Normal Form, or DNF) or an ANDed set of ORed conditions (Conjunctive Normal Form, or CNF). Individual conditions may either be negated (NOT C) or unnegated (C). The actions specified by a PolicyRule are to be performed if and only if the PolicyRule condition (whether it is represented in DNF or CNF) evaluates to TRUE. The conditions and actions associated with a policy rule are modeled, respectively, with subclasses of the classes PolicyCondition and PolicyAction. These condition and action objects are tied to instances of PolicyRule by the PolicyConditionInPolicyRule and PolicyActionInPolicyRule aggregations. As illustrated above in Section 3, a policy rule may also be associated with one or more policy time periods, indicating the schedule according to which the policy rule is active and inactive. In this case it is the PolicyRuleValidityPeriod aggregation that provides the linkage. A policy rule is illustrated conceptually in Figure 7. below. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 30] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 +------------------------------------------------+ | PolicyRule | | | | +--------------------+ +-----------------+ | | | PolicyCondition(s) | | PolicyAction(s) | | | +--------------------+ +-----------------+ | | | | +------------------------------+ | | | PolicyTimePeriodCondition(s) | | | +------------------------------+ | +------------------------------------------------+ Figure 7. Overview of the PolicyRule Class The PolicyRule class uses the property ConditionListType, to indicate whether the conditions for the rule are in DNF or CNF. The PolicyConditionInPolicyRule aggregation contains two additional properties to complete the representation of the rule's conditional expression. The first of these properties is an integer to partition the referenced conditions into one or more groups, and the second is a Boolean to indicate whether a referenced condition is negated. An example shows how ConditionListType and these two additional properties provide a unique representation of a set of conditions in either DNF or CNF. Suppose we have a PolicyRule that aggregates five PolicyConditions C1 through C5, with the following values in the properties of the five PolicyConditionInPolicyRule associations: C1: GroupNumber = 1, ConditionNegated = FALSE C2: GroupNumber = 1, ConditionNegated = TRUE C3: GroupNumber = 1, ConditionNegated = FALSE C4: GroupNumber = 2, ConditionNegated = FALSE C5: GroupNumber = 2, ConditionNegated = FALSE If ConditionListType = DNF, then the overall condition for the PolicyRule is: (C1 AND (NOT C2) AND C3) OR (C4 AND C5) On the other hand, if ConditionListType = CNF, then the overall condition for the PolicyRule is: (C1 OR (NOT C2) OR C3) AND (C4 OR C5) In both cases, there is an unambiguous specification of the overall condition that is tested to determine whether to perform the actions associated with the PolicyRule. The class definition is as follows: Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 31] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 NAME PolicyRule DESCRIPTION The central class for representing the "If Condition then Action" semantics associated with a policy rule. DERIVED FROM Policy ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES CIM_System.CreationClassName[key] CIM_System.Name[key] CreationClassName[key] PolicyRuleName[key] Enabled ConditionListType RuleUsage Priority Mandatory SequencedActions PolicyRoles 6.3.1. The Propagated Key Property "CIM_System.CreationClassName" CIM_System.CreationClassName works the same way here as it does for the class PolicyGroup. See Section 6.2.1 for details. 6.3.2. The Propagated Key Property "CIM_System.Name" CIM_System.Name works the same way here as it does for the class PolicyGroup. See Section 6.2.2 for details. 6.3.3. The Key Property "CreationClassName" This property identifies the class or subclass used in the creation of this instance. NAME CreationClassName DESCRIPTION The name of the class or subclass used in the creation of this instance. SYNTAX string[MaxLen 256] QUALIFIER key Class names in CIM are limited to alphabetic and numeric characters plus the underscore, with the restriction that the first character cannot be numeric. Refer to Appendix F "Unicode Usage" in reference [2] for an exact specification of how CIM class names are encoded in CIM strings. 6.3.4. The Key Property "PolicyRuleName" This property provides a user-friendly name for a policy rule, and is normally what will be displayed to the end-user as the instance name. It is defined as follows: NAME PolicyRuleName Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 32] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 DESCRIPTION The user-friendly name of this policy rule. SYNTAX string QUALIFIER key 6.3.5. The Property "Enabled" This property indicates whether a policy rule is currently enabled, from an administrative point of view. Its purpose is to allow a policy administrator to enable or disable a policy rule without having to add it to, or remove it from, the policy repository. The property also supports the value 'enabledForDebug'. When the property has this value, the entity evaluating the policy condition(s) is being told to evaluate the conditions for the policy rule, but not to perform the actions if the conditions evaluate to TRUE. This value serves as a debug vehicle when attempting to determine what policies would execute in a particular scenario, without taking any actions to change state during the debugging. The property definition is as follows: NAME Enabled DESCRIPTION An enumeration indicating whether a policy rule is administratively enabled, administratively disabled, or enabled for debug mode. SYNTAX uint16 VALUES enabled(1), disabled(2), enabledForDebug(3) DEFAULT VALUE enabled(1) 6.3.6. The Property "ConditionListType" This property is used to specify whether the list of policy conditions associated with this policy rule is in disjunctive normal form (DNF) or conjunctive normal form (CNF). If this property is not present, the list type defaults to DNF. The property definition is as follows: NAME ConditionListType DESCRIPTION Indicates whether the list of policy conditions associated with this policy rule is in disjunctive normal form (DNF) or conjunctive normal form (CNF). SYNTAX uint16 VALUES DNF(1), CNF(2) DEFAULT VALUE DNF(1) 6.3.7. The Property "RuleUsage" This property is a free-form string that recommends how this policy should be used. The property definition is as follows: NAME PolicyRuleUsage Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 33] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 DESCRIPTION This property is used to provide guidelines on how this policy should be used. SYNTAX string 6.3.8. The Property "Priority" This property provides a non-negative integer for prioritizing policy rules relative to each other. For policy rules that have this property, larger integer values indicate higher priority. Since one purpose of this property is to allow specific, ad hoc policy rules to temporarily override established policy rules, an instance that has this property set has a higher priority than all instances that lack it. Prioritization among policy rules provides a simple and efficient mechanism for resolving policy conflicts. The property definition is as follows: NAME Priority DESCRIPTION A non-negative integer for prioritizing this PolicyRule relative to other PolicyRules. A larger value indicates a higher priority. SYNTAX uint16 DEFAULT VALUE 0 6.3.9. The Property "Mandatory" This property indicates whether evaluation (and possibly action execution) of a PolicyRule is mandatory or not. Its concept is similar to the ability to mark packets for delivery or possible discard, based on network traffic and device load. The evaluation of a PolicyRule MUST be attempted if the Mandatory property value is TRUE. If the Mandatory property value of a PolicyRule is FALSE, then the evaluation of the rule is "best effort" and MAY be ignored. The property definition is as follows: NAME Mandatory DESCRIPTION A flag indicating that the evaluation of the PolicyConditions and execution of PolicyActions (if the condition list evaluates to TRUE) is required. SYNTAX boolean DEFAULT VALUE TRUE 6.3.10. The Property "SequencedActions" This property gives a policy administrator a way of specifying how the ordering of the policy actions associated with this PolicyRule is to be interpreted. Three values are supported: Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 34] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 o mandatory(1): Do the actions in the indicated order, or don't do them at all. o recommended(2): Do the actions in the indicated order if you can, but if you can't do them in this order, do them in another order if you can. o dontCare(3): Do them -- I don't care about the order. When error / event reporting is addressed for the Policy Framework, suitable codes will be defined for reporting that a set of actions could not be performed in an order specified as mandatory (and thus were not performed at all), that a set of actions could not be performed in a recommended order (and moreover could not be performed in any order), or that a set of actions could not be performed in a recommended order (but were performed in a different order). The property definition is as follows: NAME SequencedActions DESCRIPTION An enumeration indicating how to interpret the action ordering indicated via the PolicyActionInPolicyRule aggregation. SYNTAX uint16 VALUES mandatory(1), recommended(2), dontCare(3) DEFAULT VALUE dontCare(3) 6.3.11. The Multi-valued Property "PolicyRoles" This property represents the roles and role combinations associated with a policy rule. Each value represents one role combination. Since this is a multi-valued property, more than one role combination can be associated with a single policy rule. Each value is a string of the form [&&]* where the individual role names appear in alphabetical order (according to the collating sequence for UCS-2). The property definition is as follows: NAME PolicyRoles DESCRIPTION A set of strings representing the roles and role combinations associated with a policy rule. Each value represents one role combination. SYNTAX string 6.4. The Class "PolicyCondition" The purpose of a policy condition is to determine whether or not the set of actions (aggregated in the PolicyRule that the condition applies to) should be executed or not. For the purposes of the Policy Core Information Model, all that matters about an individual Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 35] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 PolicyCondition is that it evaluates to TRUE or FALSE. (The individual PolicyConditions associated with a PolicyRule are combined to form a compound expression in either DNF or CNF, but this is accomplished via the ConditionListType property, discussed above, and by the properties of the PolicyConditionInPolicyRule aggregation, introduced above and discussed further in Section 7.6 below.) A logical structure within an individual PolicyCondition may also be introduced, but this would have to be done in a subclass of PolicyCondition. Because it is general, the PolicyCondition class does not itself contain any "real" conditions. These will be represented by properties of the domain-specific subclasses of PolicyCondition. +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | Policy Conditions in DNF | | +-------------------------+ +-----------------------+ | | | AND list | | AND list | | | | +-------------------+ | | +-----------------+ | | | | | PolicyCondition | | | | PolicyCondition | | | | | +-------------------+ | | +-----------------+ | | | | +-------------------+ | | +-----------------+ | | | | | PolicyCondition | | ... | | PolicyCondition | | | | | +-------------------+ | ORed | +-----------------+ | | | | ... | | ... | | | | ANDed | | ANDed | | | | +-------------------+ | | +-----------------+ | | | | | PolicyCondition | | | | PolicyCondition | | | | | +-------------------+ | | +-----------------+ | | | +-------------------------+ +-----------------------+ | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ Figure 8. Overview of Policy Conditions in DNF This figure illustrates that when policy conditions are in DNF, there are one or more sets of conditions that are ANDed together to form AND lists. An AND list evaluates to TRUE if and only if all of its constituent conditions evaluate to TRUE. The overall condition then evaluates to TRUE if and only if at least one of its constituent AND lists evaluates to TRUE. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 36] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | Policy Conditions in CNF | | +-------------------------+ +-----------------------+ | | | OR list | | OR list | | | | +-------------------+ | | +-----------------+ | | | | | PolicyCondition | | | | PolicyCondition | | | | | +-------------------+ | | +-----------------+ | | | | +-------------------+ | | +-----------------+ | | | | | PolicyCondition | | ... | | PolicyCondition | | | | | +-------------------+ | ANDed | +-----------------+ | | | | ... | | ... | | | | ORed | | ORed | | | | +-------------------+ | | +-----------------+ | | | | | PolicyCondition | | | | PolicyCondition | | | | | +-------------------+ | | +-----------------+ | | | +-------------------------+ +-----------------------+ | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ Figure 9. Overview of Policy Conditions in CNF In this figure, the policy conditions are in CNF. Consequently, there are one or more OR lists, each of which evaluates to TRUE if and only if at least one of its constituent conditions evaluates to TRUE. The overall condition then evaluates to TRUE if and only if ALL of its constituent OR lists evaluate to TRUE. The class definition of PolicyCondition is as follows: NAME PolicyCondition DESCRIPTION A class representing a rule-specific or reusable policy condition to be evaluated in conjunction with a policy rule. DERIVED FROM Policy ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES SystemCreationClassName[key] SystemName[key] PolicyRuleCreationClassName[key] PolicyRuleName[key] CreationClassName[key] PolicyConditionName[key] 6.4.1. The Key Property "SystemCreationClassName" This property helps to identify the CIM_System object in whose scope this instance of PolicyCondition exists. For a rule-specific policy condition, this is the type of system (e.g., the name of the class that created this instance) in whose context the policy rule is defined. For a reusable policy condition, this is the instance of PolicyRepository (which is a subclass of CIM_System) that holds the policy condition. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 37] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 Note that this property, and the analogous property SystemName, do not represent (truly) propagated keys from an instance of the class CIM_System. (If they did, they would be written with a dot: CIM_System.CreationClassName, CIM_System.Name.) Instead, they are properties defined in the context of this class, which repeat the values from the instance of CIM_System to which the instance containing them is related, either directly via the PolicyConditionInPolicyRepository aggregation or indirectly via the PolicyConditionInPolicyRule aggregation. See Section 5.3.3 for more on this topic. This property is defined as follows: NAME SystemCreationClassName DESCRIPTION The name of the class or the subclass used in the creation of the CIM_System object in whose scope this policy condition is defined. SYNTAX string[MaxLen 256] QUALIFIER key 6.4.2. The Key Property "SystemName" This property completes the identification of the CIM_System object in whose scope this instance of PolicyCondition exists. For a rule- specific policy condition, this is the name of the instance of the system in whose context the policy rule is defined. For a reusable policy condition, this is the instance of PolicyRepository (which is a subclass of CIM_System) that holds the policy condition. This property is defined as follows: NAME SystemName DESCRIPTION The name of the CIM_System object in whose scope this policy condition is defined. SYNTAX string QUALIFIER key 6.4.3. The Key Property "PolicyRuleCreationClassName" For a rule-specific policy condition, this property helps to identify the policy rule in whose scope this instance of PolicyCondition exists. For a reusable policy condition, this property returns a special value, "No Rule", indicating that this instance of PolicyCondition is not unique to one policy rule. This property is defined as follows: NAME PolicyRuleCreationClassName DESCRIPTION For a rule-specific policy condition, this property identifies the class of the policy rule instance in whose scope this instance of PolicyCondition exists. For a reusable policy condition, this Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 38] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 property returns a special value, "No Rule", indicating that this instance of PolicyCondition is not unique to one policy rule. SYNTAX string[MaxLen 256] QUALIFIER key 6.4.4. The Key Property "PolicyRuleName" For a rule-specific policy condition, this property completes the identification of the policy rule in whose scope this instance of PolicyCondition exists. For a reusable policy condition, this property returns a special value, "No Rule", indicating that this instance of PolicyCondition is not unique to one policy rule. This property is defined as follows: NAME PolicyRuleName DESCRIPTION For a rule-specific policy condition, the name of the PolicyRule object with which this condition is associated. For a reusable policy condition, a special value, "No Rule", indicating that this condition is reusable. SYNTAX string QUALIFIER key 6.4.5. The Key Property "CreationClassName" This property identifies the class or subclass used in the creation of this instance. NAME CreationClassName DESCRIPTION The name of the class or subclass used in the creation of this instance. SYNTAX string[MaxLen 256] QUALIFIER key 6.4.6. The Key Property "PolicyConditionName" This property provides a user-friendly name for a policy condition, and is normally what will be displayed to the end-user as the instance name. It is defined as follows: NAME PolicyConditionName DESCRIPTION The user-friendly name of this policy condition. SYNTAX string QUALIFIER key Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 39] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 6.5. The Class "PolicyTimePeriodCondition" This class provides a means of representing the time periods during which a policy rule is valid, i.e., active. At all times that fall outside these time periods, the policy rule has no effect. A policy rule is treated as valid at all times if it does not specify a PolicyTimePeriodCondition. In some cases a PDP may need to perform certain setup / cleanup actions when a policy rule becomes active / inactive. For example, sessions that were established while a policy rule was active might need to be taken down when the rule becomes inactive. In other cases, however, such sessions might be left up: in this case, the effect of deactivating the policy rule would just be to prevent the establishment of new sessions. Setup / cleanup behaviors on validity period transitions are not currently addressed by the PCIM, and must be specified in 'guideline' documents, or via subclasses of PolicyRule, PolicyTimePeriodCondition or other concrete subclasses of Policy. If such behaviors need to be under the control of the policy administrator, then a mechanism to allow this control must also be specified in the subclass. PolicyTimePeriodCondition is defined as a subclass of PolicyCondition. This is to allow the inclusion of time-based criteria in the AND/OR condition definitions for a PolicyRule. Instances of this class may have up to five properties identifying time periods at different levels. The values of all the properties present in an instance are ANDed together to determine the validity period(s) for the instance. For example, an instance with an overall validity range of January 1, 2000 through December 31, 2000; a month mask that selects March and April; a day-of-the-week mask that selects Fridays; and a time of day range of 0800 through 1600 would represent the following time periods: Friday, March 5, 2000, from 0800 through 1600; Friday, March 12, 2000, from 0800 through 1600; Friday, March 19, 2000, from 0800 through 1600; Friday, March 26, 2000, from 0800 through 1600; Friday, April 2, 2000, from 0800 through 1600; Friday, April 9, 2000, from 0800 through 1600; Friday, April 16, 2000, from 0800 through 1600; Friday, April 23, 2000, from 0800 through 1600; Friday, April 30, 2000, from 0800 through 1600. Properties not present in an instance of PolicyTimePeriodCondition are implicitly treated as having their value "always enabled". Thus, in the example above, the day-of-the-month mask is not present, and so the validity period for the instance implicitly includes a day-of-the- month mask that selects all days of the month. If we apply this "missing property" rule to its fullest, we see that there is a second Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 40] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 way to indicate that a policy rule is always enabled: have it point to an instance of PolicyTimePeriodCondition whose only properties are its naming properties. The property LocalOrUtcTime indicates whether the times represented in the other five time-related properties of an instance of PolicyTimePeriodCondition are to be interpreted as local times for the location where a policy rule is being applied, or as UTC times. The class definition is as follows. Note that instances of this class are named with the six key properties it inherits from PolicyCondition: SystemCreationClassName, SystemName, PolicyRuleCreationClassName, PolicyRuleName, CreationClassName, and PolicyConditionName. NAME PolicyTimePeriodCondition DESCRIPTION A class that provides the capability of enabling / disabling a policy rule according to a pre- determined schedule. DERIVED FROM PolicyCondition ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES TimePeriod MonthOfYearMask DayOfMonthMask DayOfWeekMask TimeOfDayMask LocalOrUtcTime 6.5.1. The Property "TimePeriod" This property identifies an overall range of calendar dates and times over which a policy rule is valid. It reuses the format for an explicit time period defined in RFC 2445 (reference [10]): a string representing a starting date and time, in which the character 'T' indicates the beginning of the time portion, followed by the solidus character '/', followed by a similar string representing an end date and time. The first date indicates the beginning of the range, while the second date indicates the end. Thus, the second date and time must be later than the first. Date/times are expressed as substrings of the form "yyyymmddThhmmss". For example: 20000101T080000/20000131T120000 January 1, 2000, 0800 through January 31, 2000, noon There are also two special cases in which one of the date/time strings is replaced with a special string defined in RFC 2445. o If the first date/time is replaced with the string "THISANDPRIOR", then the property indicates that a policy rule is valid [from now] until the date/time that appears after the '/'. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 41] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 o If the second date/time is replaced with the string "THISANDFUTURE", then the property indicates that a policy rule becomes valid on the date/time that appears before the '/', and remains valid from that point on. Note that RFC 2445 does not use these two strings in connection with explicit time periods. Thus the PCIM is combining two elements from RFC 2445 that are not combined in the RFC itself. The property definition is as follows: NAME TimePeriod DESCRIPTION The range of calendar dates on which a policy rule is valid. SYNTAX string FORMAT yyyymmddThhmmss/yyyymmddThhmmss, where the first date/time may be replaced with the string "THISANDPRIOR" or the second date/time may be replaced with the string "THISANDFUTURE" 6.5.2. The Property "MonthOfYearMask" The purpose of this property is to refine the definition of the valid time period that is defined by the TimePeriod property, by explicitly specifying which months the policy is valid for. These properties work together, with the TimePeriod used to specify the overall time period that the policy is valid for, and the MonthOfYearMask used to pick out which months of that time period the policy is valid for. This property is formatted as an octet string, structured as follows: o a 4-octet length field, indicating the length of the entire octet string; this field is always set to 0x00000006 for this property; o a 2-octet field consisting of 12 bits identifying the 12 months of the year, beginning with January and ending with December, followed by 4 bits that are always set to '0'. For each month, the value '1' indicates that the policy is valid for that month, and the value '0' indicates that it is not valid. The value 0x000000060830, for example, indicates that a policy rule is valid only in the months May, November, and December . If this property is omitted, then the policy rule is treated as valid for all twelve months. The property definition is as follows: NAME MonthOfYearMask DESCRIPTION A mask identifying the months of the year in which a policy rule is valid. SYNTAX octet string FORMAT 0x00000006XXX0 Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 42] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 6.5.3. The Property "DayOfMonthMask" The purpose of this property is to refine the definition of the valid time period that is defined by the TimePeriod property, by explicitly specifying which days of the month the policy is valid for. These properties work together, with the TimePeriod used to specify the overall time period that the policy is valid for, and the DayOfMonthMask used to pick out which days of the month in that time period the policy is valid for. This property is formatted as an octet string, structured as follows: o a 4-octet length field, indicating the length of the entire octet string; this field is always set to 0x0000000C for this property; o an 8-octet field consisting of 31 bits identifying the days of the month counting from the beginning, followed by 31 more bits identifying the days of the month counting from the end, followed by 2 bits that are always set to '0'. For each day, the value '1' indicates that the policy is valid for that day, and the value '0' indicates that it is not valid. The value 0x0000000C8000000100000000, for example, indicates that a policy rule is valid on the first and last days of the month. For months with fewer than 31 days, the digits corresponding to days that the months do not have (counting in both directions) are ignored. The encoding of the 62 significant bits in the octet string matches that used for the schedDay object in the DISMAN-SCHEDULE-MIB. See reference [8] for more details on this object. The property definition is as follows: NAME DayOfMonthMask DESCRIPTION A mask identifying the days of the month on which a policy rule is valid. SYNTAX octet string FORMAT 0x0000000CXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 6.5.4. The Property "DayOfWeekMask" The purpose of this property is to refine the definition of the valid time period that is defined by the TimePeriod property by explicitly specifying which days of the week the policy is valid for. These properties work together, with the TimePeriod used to specify the overall time period that the policy is valid for, and the DayOfWeekMask used to pick out which days of the week in that time period the policy is valid for. This property is formatted as an octet string, structured as follows: Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 43] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 o a 4-octet length field, indicating the length of the entire octet string; this field is always set to 0x00000005 for this property; o a 1-octet field consisting of 7 bits identifying the 7 days of the week, beginning with Sunday and ending with Saturday, followed by 1 bit that is always set to '0'. For each day of the week, the value '1' indicates that the policy is valid for that day, and the value '0' indicates that it is not valid. The value 0x000000057C, for example, indicates that a policy rule is valid Monday through Friday. The property definition is as follows: NAME DayOfWeekMask DESCRIPTION A mask identifying the days of the week on which a policy rule is valid. SYNTAX octet string FORMAT 0x00000005XX 6.5.5. The Property "TimeOfDayMask" The purpose of this property is to refine the definition of the valid time period that is defined by the TimePeriod property by explicitly specifying a range of times in a day the policy is valid for. These properties work together, with the TimePeriod used to specify the overall time period that the policy is valid for, and the TimeOfDayMask used to pick out which range of time periods in a given day of that time period the policy is valid for. This property is formatted in the style of RFC 2445 [10]: a time string beginning with the character 'T', followed by the solidus character '/', followed by a second time string. The first time indicates the beginning of the range, while the second time indicates the end. Times are expressed as substrings of the form "Thhmmss". The second substring always identifies a later time than the first substring. To allow for ranges that span midnight, however, the value of the second string may be smaller than the value of the first substring. Thus, "T080000/T210000" identifies the range from 0800 until 2100, while "T210000/T080000" identifies the range from 2100 until 0800 of the following day. When a range spans midnight, it by definition includes parts of two successive days. When one of these days is also selected by either the MonthOfYearMask, DayOfMonthMask, and/or DayOfWeekMask, but the other day is not, then the policy is active only during the portion of the range that falls on the selected day. For example, if the range extends from 2100 until 0800, and the day of week mask selects Monday and Tuesday, then the policy is active during the following three intervals: Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 44] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 From midnight Sunday until 0800 Monday; From 2100 Monday until 0800 Tuesday; From 2100 Tuesday until 23:59:59 Tuesday. The property definition is as follows: NAME TimeOfDayMask DESCRIPTION The range of times at which a policy rule is valid. If the second time is earlier than the first, then the interval spans midnight. SYNTAX string FORMAT Thhmmss/Thhmmss 6.5.6. The Property "LocalOrUtcTime" This property indicates whether the times represented in the TimePeriod property and in the various Mask properties represent local times or UTC times. There is no provision for mixing of local times and UTC times: the value of this property applies to all of the other time-related properties. The property definition is as follows: NAME LocalOrUtcTime DESCRIPTION An indication of whether the other times in this instance represent local times or UTC times. SYNTAX uint16 VALUES localTime(1), utcTime(2) DEFAULT VALUE utcTime(2) 6.6. The Class "VendorPolicyCondition" The purpose of this class is to provide a general extension mechanism for representing policy conditions that have not been modeled with specific properties. Instead, the two properties Constraint and ConstraintEncoding are used to define the content and format of the condition, as explained below. As its name suggests, this class is intended for vendor-specific extensions to the Policy Core Information Model. Standardized extensions are not expected to use this class. The class definition is as follows: NAME VendorPolicyCondition DESCRIPTION A class that defines a registered means to describe a policy condition. DERIVED FROM PolicyCondition ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES Constraint[ ] ConstraintEncoding Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 45] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 6.6.1. The Multi-valued Property "Constraint" This property provides a general extension mechanism for representing policy conditions that have not been modeled with specific properties. The format of the octet strings in the array is left unspecified in this definition. It is determined by the OID value stored in the property ConstraintEncoding. Since ConstraintEncoding is single- valued, all the values of Constraint share the same format and semantics. NOTE: In version 2.2 of the CIM specification [2] as published, there is no direct way to represent an array of octet strings. (A single octet string can be represented as an ordered array of uint8's, but this does not work for multi-valued properties where each value is an octet string.) A change request to version 2.2 has, however, been approved, introducing a qualifier "Octetstring" that can be applied to a multi-valued string property. This qualifier functions exactly like an SMIv2 (SNMP) Textual Convention, refining the syntax and semantics of the existing CIM data types "string". Strings with this qualifier consist of a 4-octet length field, followed by an even number of the characters A-F and 0-9. The length is encoded as an 8-digit hexadecimal value, which includes the 4 octets of the length field itself. For example, the octet string 0x4a is encoded as 0x000000063441. A policy decision point can readily determine whether it supports the values stored in an instance of Constraint by checking the OID value from ConstraintEncoding against the set of OIDs it recognizes. The action for the policy decision point to take in case it does not recognize the format of this data could itself be modeled as a policy rule, governing the behavior of the policy decision point. The property is defined as follows: NAME Constraint DESCRIPTION Extension mechanism for representing constraints that have not been modeled as specific properties. The format of the values is identified by the OID stored in the property ConstraintEncoding. SYNTAX string QUALIFIER Octetstring 6.6.2. The Property "ConstraintEncoding" This property identifies the encoding and semantics of the Constraint property values in this instance. The value of this property is a single string, representing a single OID. The property is defined as follows: NAME ConstraintEncoding Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 46] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 DESCRIPTION An OID encoded as a string, identifying the format and semantics for this instance's Constraint property. The value is a dotted sequence of decimal digits (for example, "1.2.100.200") representing the arcs of the OID. The characters in the string are the UCS-2 characters corresponding to the US ASCII encodings of the numeric characters and the period. SYNTAX string 6.7. The Class "PolicyAction" The purpose of a policy action is to execute one or more operations that will affect network traffic and/or systems, devices, etc. in order to achieve a desired state. This (new) state provides one or more (new) behaviors. A policy action ordinarily changes the configuration of one or more elements. A PolicyRule contains one or more policy actions. A policy administrator can assign an order to the actions associated with a PolicyRule, complete with an indication of whether the indicated order is mandatory, recommended, or of no significance. Ordering of the actions associated with a PolicyRule is accomplished via a property in the PolicyActionInPolicyRule aggregation. The actions associated with a PolicyRule are executed if and only if the overall condition(s) of the PolicyRule evaluates to TRUE. The class definition of PolicyAction is as follows: NAME PolicyAction DESCRIPTION A class representing a rule-specific or reusable policy action to be performed if the condition for a policy rule evaluates to TRUE. DERIVED FROM Policy ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES SystemCreationClassName[key] SystemName[key] PolicyRuleCreationClassName[key] PolicyRuleName[key] CreationClassName[key] PolicyActionName[key] 6.7.1. The Key Property "SystemCreationClassName" This property helps to identify the CIM_System object in whose scope this instance of PolicyAction exists. For a rule-specific policy action, this is the type of system (e.g., the name of the class that created this instance) in whose context the policy rule is defined. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 47] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 For a reusable policy action, this is the instance of PolicyRepository (which is a subclass of CIM_System) that holds the policy action. Note that this property, and the analogous property SystemName, do not represent (truly) propagated keys from an instance of the class CIM_System. (If they did, they would be written with a dot: CIM_System.CreationClassName, CIM_System.Name.) Instead, they are properties defined in the context of this class, which repeat the values from the instance of CIM_System to which the instance containing them is related, either directly via the PolicyActionInPolicyRepository aggregation or indirectly via the PolicyActionInPolicyRule aggregation. See Section 5.3.3 for more on this topic. This property is defined as follows: NAME SystemCreationClassName DESCRIPTION The name of the class or the subclass used in the creation of the CIM_System object in whose scope this policy action is defined. SYNTAX string[MaxLen 256] QUALIFIER key 6.7.2. The Key Property "SystemName" This property completes the identification of the CIM_System object in whose scope this instance of PolicyAction exists. For a rule-specific policy action, this is the name of the instance of the system in whose context the policy rule is defined. For a reusable policy action, this is the instance of PolicyRepository (which is a subclass of CIM_System) that holds the policy action. This property is defined as follows: NAME SystemName DESCRIPTION The name of the CIM_System object in whose scope this policy action is defined. SYNTAX string QUALIFIER key 6.7.3. The Key Property "PolicyRuleCreationClassName" For a rule-specific policy action, this property helps to identify the policy rule in whose scope this instance of PolicyAction exists. For a reusable policy action, this property returns a special value, "No Rule", indicating that this instance of PolicyAction is not unique to one policy rule. This property is defined as follows: NAME PolicyRuleCreationClassName Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 48] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 DESCRIPTION For a rule-specific policy action, this property identifies the class of the policy rule instance in whose scope this instance of PolicyAction exists. For a reusable policy action, this property returns a special value, "No Rule", indicating that this instance of PolicyAction is not unique to one policy rule. SYNTAX string[MaxLen 256] QUALIFIER key 6.7.4. The Key Property "PolicyRuleName" For a rule-specific policy action, this property completes the identification of the policy rule in whose scope this instance of PolicyCondition exists. For a reusable policy action, this property returns a special value, "No Rule", indicating that this instance of PolicyCondition is not unique to one policy rule. This property is defined as follows: NAME PolicyRuleName DESCRIPTION For a rule-specific policy action, the name of the PolicyRule object with which this action is associated. For a reusable policy action, a special value, "No Rule", indicating that this action is reusable. SYNTAX string QUALIFIER key 6.7.5. The Key Property "CreationClassName" This property identifies the class or subclass used in the creation of this instance. NAME CreationClassName DESCRIPTION The name of the class or subclass used in the creation of this instance. SYNTAX string[MaxLen 256] QUALIFIER key 6.7.6. The Key Property "PolicyActionName" This property provides a user-friendly name for a policy action, and is normally what will be displayed to the end-user as the instance name. It is defined as follows: NAME PolicyActionName DESCRIPTION The user-friendly name of this policy action. SYNTAX string Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 49] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 QUALIFIER key 6.8. The Class "VendorPolicyAction" The purpose of this class is to provide a general extension mechanism for representing policy actions that have not been modeled with specific properties. Instead, the two properties ActionData and ActionEncoding are used to define the content and format of the action, as explained below. As its name suggests, this class is intended for vendor-specific extensions to the Policy Core Information Model. Standardized extensions are not expected to use this class. The class definition is as follows: NAME VendorPolicyAction DESCRIPTION A class that defines a registered means to describe a policy action. DERIVED FROM PolicyAction ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES ActionData[ ] ActionEncoding 6.8.1. The Multi-valued Property "ActionData" This property provides a general extension mechanism for representing policy actions that have not been modeled with specific properties. The format of the octet strings in the array is left unspecified in this definition. It is determined by the OID value stored in the property ActionEncoding. Since ActionEncoding is single-valued, all the values of ActionData share the same format and semantics. See Section 6.6.1 for a discussion of the extension to CIM 2.2 used to encode ActionData. A policy decision point can readily determine whether it supports the values stored in an instance of ActionData by checking the OID value from ActionEncoding against the set of OIDs it recognizes. The action for the policy decision point to take in case it does not recognize the format of this data could itself be modeled as a policy rule, governing the behavior of the policy decision point. The property is defined as follows: NAME ActionData DESCRIPTION Extension mechanism for representing actions that have not been modeled as specific properties. The format of the values is identified by the OID stored in the property ActionEncoding. SYNTAX string QUALIFIER Octetstring Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 50] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 6.8.2. The Property "ActionEncoding" This property identifies the encoding and semantics of the ActionData property values in this instance. The value of this property is a single string, representing a single OID. The property is defined as follows: NAME ActionEncoding DESCRIPTION An OID encoded as a string, identifying the format and semantics for this instance's ActionData property. The value is a dotted sequence of decimal digits (for example, "1.2.100.200") representing the arcs of the OID. The characters in the string are the UCS-2 characters corresponding to the US ASCII encodings of the numeric characters and the period. SYNTAX string 6.9. The Class "PolicyRepository" The class definition of PolicyRepository is as follows: NAME PolicyRepository DESCRIPTION A class representing an administratively defined container for reusable policy-related information. This class does not introduce any additional properties beyond those in its superclass CIM_AdminDomain, other than the key properties necessary to make it instantiable. It does, however, participate in a number of unique associations. DERIVED FROM CIM_AdminDomain ABSTRACT FALSE 6.9.1. Naming an Instance of "PolicyRepository" An instance of PolicyRepository is named by the two key properties CreationClassName and Name that it inherits from its superclass CIM_AdminDomain. These properties are actually defined in CIM_AdminDomain's superclass, CIM_System, and then inherited by CIM_AdminDomain. For instances of PolicyRepository itself, the value of CreationClassName must be "PolicyRepository" (or "CIM_PolicyRepository" once the class has made its way into an approved CIM schema). If a subclass of PolicyRepository (perhaps QosPolicyRepository) is defined, then CIM allows its instances to return either "PolicyRepository" or the subclass name ("QosPolicyRepository" in the example given) as the value of Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 51] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 CreationClassName. See Section 5.3.1 for a more complete discussion of the role of the CreationClassName property in CIM. 7. Association and Aggregation Definitions The first two subsections of this section introduce associations and aggregations as they are used in CIM. The third subsection discusses object references in association classes. The remaining subsections present the class definitions for the associations and aggregations that are part of the Policy Core Information Model. 7.1. Associations An association is a CIM construct representing a relationship between two or more objects. It is modeled as a class containing two or more object references. Associations can be defined between classes without affecting any of the related classes. That is, addition of an association does not affect the interface of the related classes. 7.2. Aggregations An aggregation is a strong form of an association, which usually represents a "whole-part" relationship. For example, CIM uses an aggregation to represent the containment relationship between a system and the components that make up the system. Aggregation often implies, but does not require, that the aggregated objects have mutual dependencies. 7.3. Object References As noted above, a CIM association always involves two or more object references. CIM decomposes an object reference into two parts: a high-order part that identifies a namespace, and a model path that identifies an object instance within a namespace. The model path, in turn, can be decomposed into an object class identifier and a set of key values needed to identify an instance of that class. Because the object class identifier is part of the model path, a CIM object reference is strongly typed. The ContainingGroup object reference in the PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup association, for example, can only point to an instance of PolicyGroup, or to an instance of a subclass of PolicyGroup. Contrast this with LDAP, where a DN pointer is completely untyped: it identifies (by DN) an entry, but places no restriction on that entry's object class(es). 7.4. The Aggregation "PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup" The PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup aggregation enables policy groups to be nested. This is critical for scalability and manageability, as it enables complex policies to be constructed from multiple simpler policies for administrative convenience. For example, a policy group Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 52] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 representing policies for the US might have nested within it policy groups for the Eastern and Western US. A PolicyGroup may aggregate other PolicyGroups via this aggregation, or it may aggregate PolicyRules via the PolicyRuleInPolicyGroup aggregation. But a single PolicyGroup SHALL NOT do both. The class definition for the aggregation is as follows: NAME PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup DESCRIPTION A class representing the aggregation of PolicyGroups by a higher-level PolicyGroup. ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES ContainingGroup[ref PolicyGroup[0..n]] ContainedGroup[ref PolicyGroup[0..n]] 7.4.1. The Reference "ContainingGroup" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyGroup that contains one or more other PolicyGroups. Note that for any single instance of the aggregation class PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that there may be 0, 1, or more than one PolicyGroups that contain any given PolicyGroup. 7.4.2. The Reference "ContainedGroup" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyGroup contained by one or more other PolicyGroups. Note that for any single instance of the aggregation class PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that a given PolicyGroup may contain 0, 1, or more than one other PolicyGroups. 7.5. The Aggregation "PolicyRuleInPolicyGroup" A policy group may aggregate one or more policy rules, via the PolicyRuleInPolicyGroup aggregation. Grouping of policy rules into a policy group is again for administrative convenience; a policy rule may also be used by itself, without belonging to a policy group. A PolicyGroup may aggregate PolicyRules via this aggregation, or it may aggregate other PolicyGroups via the PolicyGroupInPolicyGroup aggregation. But a single PolicyGroup SHALL NOT do both. The class definition for the aggregation is as follows: NAME PolicyRuleInPolicyGroup DESCRIPTION A class representing the aggregation of PolicyRules by a PolicyGroup. ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES ContainingGroup[ref PolicyGroup[0..n]] Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 53] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 ContainedRule[ref PolicyRule[0..n]] 7.5.1. The Reference "ContainingGroup" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyGroup that contains one or more PolicyRules. Note that for any single instance of the aggregation class PolicyRuleInPolicyGroup, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that there may be 0, 1, or more than one PolicyGroups that contain any given PolicyRule. 7.5.2. The Reference "ContainedRule" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyRule contained by one or more PolicyGroups. Note that for any single instance of the aggregation class PolicyRuleInPolicyGroup, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that a given PolicyGroup may contain 0, 1, or more than one PolicyRules. 7.6. The Aggregation "PolicyConditionInPolicyRule" A policy rule aggregates zero or more instances of the PolicyCondition class, via the PolicyConditionInPolicyRule association. A policy rule that aggregates zero policy conditions is not a valid rule -- it may, for example, be in the process of being entered into the policy repository. A policy rule has no effect until it is valid. The conditions aggregated by a policy rule are grouped into two levels of lists: either an ORed set of ANDed sets of conditions (DNF, the default) or an ANDed set of ORed sets of conditions (CNF). Individual conditions in these lists may be negated. The property ConditionListType specifies which of these two grouping schemes applies to a particular PolicyRule. The conditions are used to determine whether to perform the actions associated with the PolicyRule. One or more policy time periods may be among the conditions associated with a policy rule via the PolicyConditionInPolicyRule association. In this case, the time periods are simply additional conditions to be evaluated along with any other conditions specified for the rule. The class definition for the aggregation is as follows: NAME PolicyConditionInPolicyRule DESCRIPTION A class representing the aggregation of PolicyConditions by a PolicyRule. ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES ContainingRule[ref PolicyRule[0..n]] ContainedCondition[ref PolicyCondition[0..n]] GroupNumber ConditionNegated Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 54] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 7.6.1. The Reference "ContainingRule" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyRule that contains one or more PolicyConditions. Note that for any single instance of the aggregation class PolicyConditionInPolicyRule, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that there may be 0, 1, or more than one PolicyRules that contain any given PolicyCondition. 7.6.2. The Reference "ContainedCondition" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyCondition contained by one or more PolicyRules. Note that for any single instance of the aggregation class PolicyConditionInPolicyRule, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that a given PolicyRule may contain 0, 1, or more than one PolicyConditions. 7.6.3. The Property "GroupNumber" This property contains an integer identifying the group to which the condition referenced by the ContainedCondition property is assigned in forming the overall conditional expression for the policy rule identified by the ContainingRule reference. The property is defined as follows: NAME GroupNumber DESCRIPTION Unsigned integer indicating the group to which the condition identified by the ContainedCondition property is to be assigned. SYNTAX uint16 7.6.4. The Property "ConditionNegated" This property is a boolean, indicating whether the condition referenced by the ContainedCondition property is negated in forming the overall conditional expression for the policy rule identified by the ContainingRule reference. The property is defined as follows: NAME ConditionNegated DESCRIPTION Indication of whether the condition identified by the ContainedCondition property is negated. (TRUE indicates that the condition is negated, FALSE indicates that it is not negated.) SYNTAX boolean Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 55] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 7.7. The Association "PolicyConditionSubject" This association represents a condition that identifies the subject requesting a service that is controlled by a policy rule. A subject might, for example, request access to a particular system, or to a particular resource (file, printer, etc.) associated with a system, or it might request that a particular system or resource be started or shut down. In networking cases, a subject is ordinarily identified by the origin address information in the packet that causes a policy rule to be evaluated. Thus some component of the Policy Framework must resolve the object reference present in this association into a lower-level condition against which an origin address can be tested. The component that performs this resolution is typically, but not necessarily, the PDP. The resolution itself may be minimal, since in some cases the object being referred to will have an address, address range, or subnet as one of its properties. In other cases, though, the object may identify a subject only by name, in which case other information correlating names with network addresses must be used to perform the resolution. The class definition for the association is as follows: NAME PolicyConditionSubject DESCRIPTION A class indicating that a CIM_ManagedSystemElement plays the subject role for a policy condition. ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES Subject[ref CIM_ManagedSystemElement[0..n]] Condition[ref PolicyCondition[0..n]] 7.7.1. The Reference "Subject" This property contains an object reference to a CIM_ManagedSystemElement that plays the subject role for one or more PolicyConditions. Note that for any single instance of the association class PolicyConditionSubject, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that a given CIM_ManagedSystemElement may play the subject role for 0, 1, or more than one PolicyConditions. A CIM_ManagedSystemElement can represent a variety of entities that could be under policy control of varying degrees of granularity, from a router interface to a subnet or system. 7.7.2. The Reference "Condition" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyCondition related to one or more subjects. Note that for any single instance of the association class PolicyConditionSubject, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 56] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 indicates that a given PolicyCondition may be associated with 0, 1, or more than one CIM_ManagedSystemElements that play the subject role for the condition. 7.8. The Association "PolicyConditionTarget" This association represents a condition that identifies the target of a requested service that is controlled by a policy rule. A target might, for example, be a particular system to which a subject is requesting access, or a particular resource (file, printer, etc.) associated with a system. In networking cases, a target is ordinarily identified by the destination address information in the packet that causes a policy rule to be evaluated. Thus some component of the Policy Framework must resolve the object reference present in this association into a lower-level condition against which a destination address can be tested. The component that performs this resolution is typically, but not necessarily, the PDP. The resolution itself may be minimal, since in some cases the object being referred to will have an address, address range, or subnet as one of its properties. In other cases, though, the object may identify a target only by name, in which case other information correlating names with network addresses must be used to perform the resolution. The class definition for the association is as follows: NAME PolicyConditionTarget DESCRIPTION A class indicating that a CIM_ManagedSystemElement plays the target role for a policy condition. ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES Target[ref CIM_ManagedSystemElement[0..n]] Condition[ref PolicyCondition[0..n]] 7.8.1. The Reference "Target" This property contains an object reference to a CIM_ManagedSystemElement that plays the target role for one or more PolicyConditions. Note that for any single instance of the association class PolicyConditionTarget, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that a given CIM_ManagedSystemElement may play the target role for 0, 1, or more than one PolicyConditions. 7.8.2. The Reference "Condition" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyCondition related to one or more targets. Note that for any single instance of the association class PolicyConditionTarget, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 57] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 indicates that a given PolicyCondition may be associated with 0, 1, or more than one CIM_ManagedSystemElements that play the target role for the condition. 7.9. The Aggregation "PolicyRuleValidityPeriod" A different relationship between a policy rule and a policy time period is represented by the PolicyRuleValidityPeriod aggregation: scheduled activation and deactivation of the policy rule. If a policy rule is associated with multiple policy time periods via this association, then the rule is active if at least one of the time periods indicates that it is active. (In other words, the time periods are ORed to determine whether the rule is active.) A policy time period may be aggregated by multiple policy rules. A rule that does not point to a policy time period via this aggregation is, from the point of view of scheduling, always active. It may, however, be inactive for other reasons. Time periods are a general concept that can be used in other applications. However, they are mentioned explicitly here in this specification since they are frequently used in policy applications. The class definition for the aggregation is as follows: NAME PolicyRuleValidityPeriod DESCRIPTION A class representing the aggregation of PolicyTimePeriodConditions by a PolicyRule. ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES ContainingRule[ref PolicyRule[0..n]] ContainedPtp[ref PolicyTimePeriodCondition[0..n]] 7.9.1. The Reference "ContainingRule" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyRule that contains one or more PolicyTimePeriodConditions. Note that for any single instance of the aggregation class PolicyRuleValidityPeriod, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that there may be 0, 1, or more than one PolicyRules that contain any given PolicyTimePeriodCondition. 7.9.2. The Reference "ContainedPtp" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyTimePeriodCondition contained by one or more PolicyRules. Note that for any single instance of the aggregation class PolicyRuleValidityPeriod, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that a given PolicyRule may contain 0, 1, or more than one PolicyTimePeriodConditions. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 58] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 7.10. The Aggregation "PolicyActionInPolicyRule" A policy rule may aggregate zero or more policy actions. A policy rule that aggregates zero policy actions is not a valid rule -- it may, for example, be in the process of being entered into the policy repository. A policy rule has no effect until it is valid. The actions associated with a PolicyRule may be given a required order, a recommended order, or no order at all. For actions represented as separate objects, the PolicyActionInPolicyRule aggregation can be used to express an order. This aggregation does not indicate whether a specified action order is required, recommended, or of no significance; the property SequencedActions in the aggregating instance of PolicyRule provides this indication. The class definition for the aggregation is as follows: NAME PolicyActionInPolicyRule DESCRIPTION A class representing the aggregation of PolicyActions by a PolicyCondition. ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES ContainingRule[ref PolicyRule[0..n]] ContainedAction[ref PolicyAction[0..n]] ActionOrder 7.10.1. The Reference "ContainingRule" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyRule that contains one or more PolicyActions. Note that for any single instance of the aggregation class PolicyActionInPolicyRule, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that there may be 0, 1, or more than one PolicyRules that contain any given PolicyAction. 7.10.2. The Reference "ContainedAction" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyAction contained by one or more PolicyRules. Note that for any single instance of the aggregation class PolicyActionInPolicyRule, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that a given PolicyRule may contain 0, 1, or more than one PolicyActions. 7.10.3. The Property "ActionOrder" This property provides an unsigned integer 'n' that indicates the relative position of an action in the sequence of actions associated with a policy rule. When 'n' is a positive integer, it indicates a place in the sequence of actions to be performed, with smaller integers indicating earlier positions in the sequence. The special Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 59] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 value '0' indicates "don't care". If two or more actions have the same non-zero sequence number, they may be performed in any order, but they must all be performed at the appropriate place in the overall action sequence. A series of examples will make ordering of actions clearer: o If all actions have the same sequence number, regardless of whether it is '0' or non-zero, any order is acceptable. o The values 1:ACTION A 2:ACTION B 1:ACTION C 3:ACTION D indicate two acceptable orders: A,C,B,D or C,A,B,D, since A and C can be performed in either order, but only at the '1' position. o The values 0:ACTION A 2:ACTION B 3:ACTION C 3:ACTION D require that B,C, and D occur either as B,C,D or as B,D,C. Action A may appear at any point relative to B,C, and D. Thus the complete set of acceptable orders is: A,B,C,D; B,A,C,D; B,C,A,D; B,C,D,A; A,B,D,C; B,A,D,C; B,D,A,C; B,D,C,A. Note that the non-zero sequence numbers need not start with '1', and they need not be consecutive. All that matters is their relative magnitude. The property is defined as follows: NAME ActionOrder DESCRIPTION Unsigned integer indicating the relative position of an action in the sequence of actions aggregated by a policy rule. SYNTAX uint16 7.11. The Association "PolicyConditionInPolicyRepository" A reusable policy condition is always related to a single PolicyRepository, via the PolicyConditionInPolicyRepository association. Since, however, the PolicyCondition class represents both reusable and rule-specific policy conditions, an instance of PolicyCondition (one that represents a rule-specific condition) may not be related to any policy repository via this association. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 60] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 The class definition for the association is as follows: NAME PolicyConditionInPolicyRepository DESCRIPTION A class representing the inclusion of a reusable PolicyCondition in a PolicyRepository. ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES ContainingRepository[ref PolicyRepository[0..1]] ContainedCondition[ref PolicyCondition[0..n]] 7.11.1. The Reference "ContainingRepository" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyRepository containing one or more PolicyConditions. A reusable PolicyCondition is always related to exactly one PolicyRepository via the PolicyConditionInPolicyRepository association. The [0..1] cardinality for this property covers the two types of PolicyConditions: 0 for a rule-specific PolicyCondition, 1 for a reusable one. 7.11.2. The Reference "ContainedCondition" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyCondition included in a PolicyRepository. Note that for any single instance of the association class PolicyConditionInPolicyRepository, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that a given PolicyRepository may contain 0, 1, or more than one PolicyConditions. 7.12. The Association "PolicyActionInPolicyRepository" A reusable policy action is always related to a single PolicyRepository, via the PolicyActionInPolicyRepository association. Since, however, the PolicyAction class represents both reusable and rule-specific policy actions, an instance of PolicyAction (one that represents a rule-specific action) may not be related to any policy repository via this association. The class definition for the association is as follows: NAME PolicyActionInPolicyRepository DESCRIPTION A class representing the inclusion of a reusable PolicyAction in a PolicyRepository. ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES ContainingRepository[ref PolicyRepository[0..1]] ContainedAction[ref PolicyAction[0..n]] 7.12.1. The Reference "ContainingRepository" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyRepository containing one or more PolicyActions. A reusable PolicyAction is always related to exactly one PolicyRepository via the PolicyActionInPolicyRepository association. The [0..1] cardinality Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 61] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 for this property covers the two types of PolicyActions: 0 for a rule-specific PolicyAction, 1 for a reusable one. 7.12.2. The Reference "ContainedAction" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyAction included in a PolicyRepository. Note that for any single instance of the association class PolicyActionInPolicyRepository, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that a given PolicyRepository may contain 0, 1, or more than one PolicyActions. 7.13. The Weak Association "PolicyGroupInSystem" This association links a PolicyGroup to the CIM_System in whose scope the PolicyGroup is defined. The class definition for the association is as follows: NAME PolicyGroupInSystem DESCRIPTION A class representing the fact that a PolicyGroup is defined within the scope of a CIM_System. ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES DefiningSystem[ref CIM_System] ScopedGroup[ref PolicyGroup[weak]] 7.13.1. The Reference "DefiningSystem" This property contains an object reference to a CIM_System that provides a scope for one or more PolicyGroups. Since this is a weak association, the cardinality for CIM_System is always 1, that is, a PolicyGroup is always defined within the scope of exactly one CIM_System. 7.13.2. The Reference "ScopedGroup" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyGroup defined within the scope of a CIM_System. Note that for any single instance of the association class PolicyGroupInSystem, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that a given CIM_System may have 0, 1, or more than one PolicyGroups defined within its scope. 7.14. The Weak Association "PolicyRuleInSystem" Regardless of whether it belongs to a PolicyGroup (or to multiple PolicyGroups), a PolicyRule is itself defined within the scope of a CIM_System. This association links a PolicyRule to the CIM_System in whose scope the PolicyRule is defined. The class definition for the association is as follows: Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 62] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 NAME PolicyRuleInSystem DESCRIPTION A class representing the fact that a PolicyRule is defined within the scope of a CIM_System. ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES DefiningSystem[ref CIM_System] ScopedRule[ref PolicyRule[weak]] 7.14.1. The Reference "DefiningSystem" This property contains an object reference to a CIM_System that provides a scope for one or more PolicyRules. Since this is a weak association, the cardinality for CIM_System is always 1, that is, a PolicyRule is always defined within the scope of exactly one CIM_System. 7.14.2. The Reference "ScopedRule" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyRule defined within the scope of a CIM_System. Note that for any single instance of the association class PolicyRuleInSystem, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that a given CIM_System may have 0, 1, or more than one PolicyRules defined within its scope. 7.15. The Aggregation "PolicyRepositoryInPolicyRepository" The PolicyRepositoryInPolicyRepository aggregation enables policy repositories to be nested. The class definition for the aggregation is as follows: NAME PolicyRepositoryInPolicyRepository DESCRIPTION A class representing the aggregation of PolicyRepositories by a higher-level PolicyRepository. ABSTRACT FALSE PROPERTIES ContainingRepository[ref PolicyRepository[0..n]] ContainedRepository[ref PolicyRepository[0..n]] 7.15.1. The Reference "ContainingRepository" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyRepository that contains one or more other PolicyRepositories. Note that for any single instance of the aggregation class PolicyRepositoryInPolicyRepository, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that there may be 0, 1, or more than one PolicyRepositories that contain any given PolicyRepository. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 63] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 7.15.2. The Reference "ContainedRepository" This property contains an object reference to a PolicyRepository contained by one or more other PolicyRepositories. Note that for any single instance of the aggregation class PolicyRepositoryInPolicyRepository, this property (like all Reference properties) is single-valued. The [0..n] cardinality indicates that a given PolicyRepository may contain 0, 1, or more than one other PolicyRepositories. 8. Intellectual Property The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any intellectual property or other rights that might be claimed to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in this document or the extent to which any license under such rights might or might not be available; neither does it represent that it has made any effort to identify any such rights. Information on the IETF's procedures with respect to rights in standards-track and standards- related documentation can be found in BCP-11. Copies of claims of rights made available for publication and any assurances of licenses to be made available, or the result of an attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of such proprietary rights by implementers or users of this specification can be obtained from the IETF Secretariat. The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary rights which may cover technology that may be required to practice this standard. Please address the information to the IETF Executive Director. 9. Acknowledgements The Policy Core Information Model in this document is closely based on the work of the DMTF's Service Level Agreements working group, so thanks are due to the members of that working group. Several of the policy classes in this model first appeared in early drafts on IPSec policy and QoS policy. The authors of these drafts were Partha Bhattacharya, Rob Adams, William Dixon, Roy Pereira, Raju Rajan, Jean- Christophe Martin, Sanjay Kamat, Michael See, Rajiv Chaudhury, Dinesh Verma, George Powers, and Raj Yavatkar. 10. Security Considerations o This document itself does not introduce any new security issues for the Internet, similar to the circumstances which existed when SMI was introduced. However, it is necessary to document the Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 64] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 requirements for a secure policy system, in order to show that the overall policy framework is viable. Our model for documenting these requirements is based on prior work in the IETF on DNSSEC and SNMPv3. One of our objectives in the policy work in the IETF is to not break the known existing security mechanisms, or to make them less effective, regardless of whether or not these security mechanisms affect what flows on the wire. o Users: The first step in identifying security requirements for policy, is to identify the users of policy. The users fall into three categories: o Administrators of Schema: This group requires the most stringent authorization and associated security controls. An improper or mal-formed change in the design of the policy schema carries with it the danger of rendering the repository inoperable while the repository is being repaired or re-built. During this time, the policy enforcement entities would need to continue to enforce policies according to their prior configuration. The good news is that it is expected that large network operators will change schema design infrequently, and, when they do, the schema creation changes will be tested on an off-line copy of the directory before the operational directory is updated. Typically, a small group of schema administrators will be authorized to make these changes in a service provider or enterprise environment. The ability to maintain an audit trail is also required here. o Administrators of Schema Content: This group requires authorization to load values (entries) into a policy repository) schema (read/write access). An audit trail mechanism is also required here. The effect of entering improperly formatted or maliciously- intended data into a policy repository, could potentially result in re-configuring mass numbers of network elements in a way that renders them to be inoperable, or of rendering network resources inaccessible for an extended period of time. o Applications and PDPs: These entities must be authorized for read- only access to the policy repository, so that they may acquire policy for the purposes of passing it to their respective enforcement entities. o Security Disciplines: o Audit Trail (Non-repudiation): We document the need for this function in systems which maintain and distribute policy. The dependency for support of this function is on the implementers of these systems, and not on any specific standards for implementation. The requirement for a policy system is that a minimum level of auditing via an auditing facility must be provided. Logging should be enabled. This working group will not specify what this minimal auditing function consists of. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 65] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 o Access Control/Authorization: Access Control List (ACL) functionality must be provided. The two administrative sets of users documented above will form the basis for two administrative use cases which require support. o Authentication: Authentication support on the order of that available with TLS and Kerboros are acceptable for authentication. We advise against using weaker mechanisms, such as clear text and HTTP Digest. Mutual authentication is recommended. o Integrity/Privacy: Integrity/privacy support on the order of TLS or IPSEC is acceptable for encryption and data integrity on the wire. If physical or virtual access to the policy repository is in question, it may also be necessary to encrypt the policy data as it is stored on the file system; however, specification of mechanisms for this purpose are outside the scope of this working group. In any case, we recommend that the physical server be located in a physically secure environment. In the case of PDP-to-PEP communications, the use of IPSEC is recommended for providing confidentiality, data origin authentication, integrity and replay prevention. See reference [9]. o Denial of Service: We recommend the use of multiple policy repositories, such that a denial of service attack on any one repository will not make all policy data inaccessible to legitimate users. However, this still leaves a denial of service attack exposure. Our belief is that the use of a policy schema, in a centrally administered but physically distributed policy repository, does not increase the risk of denial of service attacks; however, such attacks are still possible. If executed successfully, such an attack could prevent PDPs from accessing a policy repository, and thus prevent them from acquiring new policy. In such a case, the PDPs, and associated PEPs would continue operating under the policies in force before the denial of service attack was launched. Note that exposure of policy systems to denial of service attacks is not any greater than the exposure of DNS with DNSSEC in place. 11. References [1] Distributed Management Task Force, Inc., "Common Information Model (CIM) Schema, version 2.2, June 14, 1999. The components of the CIM v2.2 schema are available via links on the following DMTF web page: http://www.dmtf.org/spec/cims.html. Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 66] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 [2] Distributed Management Task Force, Inc., "Common Information Model (CIM) Specification, version 2.2, June 14, 1999. This document is available on the following DMTF web page: http://www.dmtf.org/spec/cims.html. [3] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. [4] Hovey, R., and S. Bradner, "The Organizations Involved in the IETF Standards Process", BCP 11, RFC 2028, October 1996. [5] J. Strassner and S. Judd, "Directory-Enabled Networks", version 3.0c5 (August 1998). A PDF file is available at http://www.murchiso.com/den/#denspec. [6] J. Strassner, policy architecture BOF presentation, 42nd IETF Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, October, 1998. Minutes of this BOF are available at the following location: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/98aug/index.html. [7] Yergeau, F., "UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646", RFC 2279, January 1998. [8] Levi, D., and J. Schoenwaelder, "Definitions of Managed Objects for Scheduling Management Operations", RFC 2591, May 1999. [9] R. Yavatkar and D. Pendarakis, R. Guerin, "A Framework for Policy- based Admission Control", RFC 2753, January 2000. [10] Dawson, F., and D. Stenerson, "Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar)", RFC 2445, November 1998. 12. Authors' Addresses John Strassner Cisco Systems, Bldg 15 170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, CA 95134 Phone: +1 408-527-1069 Fax: +1 408-527-6351 E-mail: johns@cisco.com Ed Ellesson IBM Corporation/Tivoli, JDGA/501 4205 S. Miami Blvd. Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 Phone: +1 919-254-4115 Fax: +1 919-254-6243 E-mail: ed_ellesson@tivoli.com Bob Moore Moore, et al. Expires: May 2000 + 6 months [Page 67] Internet Draft Policy Core Information Model May 2000 IBM Corporation, BRQA/502 4205 S. Miami Blvd. Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 Phone: +1 919-254-4436 Fax: +1 919-254-6243 E-mail: remoore@us.ibm.com 13. 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