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TNC PlugFest - Gearvana!

https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/blog/

April 6th, 2009 by Lisa Lorenzin
By Lisa Lorenzin, Juniper Networks

A couple weeks ago, I had the great pleasure to attend the TNC’s fourth annual interoperability test event. We fondly call this gathering a PlugFest, because we plug this into that and see what happens! And this year, we had a whole lotta pluggin’ goin’ on.

Our gracious hosts, the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab, provided their usual impressive facilities and service. They have an amazing lab, host to several different testing areas for everything from IPv6 to POE (as well as flexible space with power and patch panels, for groups like ours), with adjacent conference rooms for white-board sessions and participating in WG calls. As if that wasn’t enough, they also had an on-site cafeteria, and an endless supply of snack bars and coffee in the lab itself! (I have the metabolism of a rodent, so I regard calories the way most people seem to regard caffeine: critical for a multi-day testing marathon.)

As with previous PlugFests, we had TNC implementers bringing products that utilize a wide range of TNC interfaces: IF-PEP for RADIUS, IF-TNCCS, IF-TNCCS-SOH, IF-IMC & IF-IMV, and IF-MAP. Whew! This year we had so many participants that we divided the room into three areas: IF-PEP for RADIUS, in which we tested policy servers acting as PDPs and switches & wireless APs acting as PEPs; IF-TNCCS-SOH, in which we tested communication between a TNC policy server and a client using Microsoft NAP’s Statement of Health protocol; and IF-MAP, in which endpoint discovery and behavior monitoring solutions acted as Sensors and Flow Controllers publishing data to, and searching / subscribing to data from, a MAP Server.

And that was just the meatspace setup. New for this year, we had a contingent of participants testing an open-source solution, involving five separate open-source components, in a virtual environment! Last year we had the first-ever testing of open-source TNC implementations. The testing never actually succeeded, but the process was incredibly educational, and it was very cool to watch the participants patching their code on the fly. This year, many things worked! And the virtual environment allowed us to have testers from Germany, Australia, and western US participating together, while I verified the results from the northeastern US. Technology really does bring the world together - and it was awesome to see how far the open-source implementations have come since just last year.

The whole thing was, as you might expect, loosely-organized chaos. It was also extremely productive and incredibly fun. Sometimes the tests succeeded on the first try - always exciting! Sometimes they didn’t - and we had to stretch our brains to figure out the cause: Was it a bug? A misconfiguration? A difference in interpretation of the spec? A problem with the spec itself? Packets flew, sniffers captured, tcpdumps dumped, code was modified on the fly. The best part about testing among friends is that when something goes wrong, everybody jumps in to try to solve the puzzle - no egos involved, just a bunch of geeks poking at a bunch of packets.

(A note to the reader: In case you think I’m being coy by not mentioning specific names or products, you should know that the proceedings and results of the TNC PlugFest are confidential, which is a pretty tight constraint on what I can write here. It’s quite a challenge to describe a PlugFest without being able to talk about what actually happened! You can read the official TCG press release for more info on who participated.)

Not only were we able to work through the base set of TNC interoperability tests, but a small group of us piggybacked an additional project on the PlugFest: Testing for our joint interoperability demo at the TCG pre-conference workshop at RSA. Want to know what we did? Come to the workshop and see! (Yes, sorry, that’s a shameless plug. I’m really excited about this year’s workshop - we get to do separate sessions for developers and end-users, so we get to explore under the hood and address the real world.)

Lest I give the impression that the PlugFest was all work and no play, we had some truly incredible food while we were there, too. The Green Monkey, in nearby Portsmouth, NH, was the site of our first night’s feast - “New American Cuisine”, which apparently means they serve a little of everything, and all of it delicious. This being New England, they even knew how to make a real dark ‘n’ stormy - no wimpy ginger ale here. Plus, they were willing to split checks for a table of sixteen! Now that’s service. The next night, a smaller group of us converged on Jumpin’ Jay’s Fish Café, which is much tastier than the name, or even the website, would suggest. If you go, get the sauce sampler - each one better than the last…

So - good geeking, good food, and good company. I miss it already, and I can’t wait for the next one.