Patent application jeopardizes IETF syslog standard

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Jul 4, 2006, 8:24:05 PM7/4/06

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Patent application jeopardizes IETF syslog standard
Thursday June 29, 2006 (09:00 AM GMT)
By: David 'cdlu' Graham

The Internet Engineering Task Force is working on a proposed standard
for the age-old but never standardized syslog protocol, but its efforts
may be in jeopardy thanks to a patent application by Huawei
Technologies Co., Ltd., of Shenzhen, China.

Syslog working group member Rainer Gerhards describes the purpose of
the work this way:

Syslog is mostly a de facto standard. This means that no "real"
(officially written) standard exists. Syslog has a number of security
shortcomings. An IETF working group was created to solve these security
issues. A side-effect of this is that the protocol itself must be
standardized. One standard -- RFC 3195 -- is already published. RFC
3195 is a big departure from traditional syslog and not really accepted
by the market. The IETF syslog working group is currently trying to
standardize

a) the syslog message format
b) messages transmission over a secure transport, namely TLS

In practice, syslog is already being used over TLS (or SSL, which
essentially is the same). However, these solutions do not interoperate
very well and the big players (like Cisco) do not natively support it
because there is no official standard (at least this is my best guess
why they do not).

In even shorter words, the IETF is trying to standardize a secure way
of doing syslog. A way that is already in widespread use today.