Re: [sacm] Comments on draft-ietf-sacm-ecp

[Adam Montville <[e-mail]>]

> On Apr 4, 2018, at 9:49 AM, Haynes Jr., Dan <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Wherever the draft says something like "SWIMA Posture Collection", I would say "SWIMA inventory collection" or something similar to that. Posture has s specific definition per our terminology draft [3], and the information enabled by use of SWIMA is part of, but is not in total, posture information.
> [danny] Can you clarify? Looking at the definition for posture in GitHub, it says: “…the configuration and state information that is collected from a target endpoint in the form of endpoint attributes (e.g. software/hardware inventory, configuration settings, dynamically assigned addresses). This information may constitute one or more posture attributes.”. It seems like what SWIMA collects is posture to me?
>  
> Sure. The context I have is that we, long ago, talked about the posture of an endpoint being the collection of software load, configuration state, vulnerability state (or something similar to that). Software load is a part of that. If I read the definition very literally, it reads "configuration and state information" rather than "configuration or state information" or "configuration and/or state information". The singular examples in the definition notwithstanding, when I read the phrase "SWIMA Posture Collection" I feel like SWIMA should be capable of collecting all possible posture information.
>  
> [danny] I guess I didn’t read that “and” so literally in the terminology :). And yes, through extensions, ECP (not SWIMA) is capable of collecting all possible posture information. SWIMA just focuses on software inventory information.
>  
> I'm interested in what others think as well. Also, the only reason I'm commenting is for others' benefit - I understand what the draft means, but a first-time reader may not.
>  
> [danny] In that case, what do others think about this?

Yes, please opine. In the interest of clarity and thrash-avoidance, I would prefer that we use posture to reference complete posture rather than part of posture, otherwise we'll always be needing to qualify which parts of posture we really mean or leaving it up to context, which is sometimes fine but sometimes not.