RE: [OpenCALEA] standards compliance

[Jesse Norell]

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 10:23 -0500, Raw, Randy wrote:
> I talked to a TTP (take this for what it's worth), who said that
> OpenCALEA only addressed step 1 of 4 steps of the CALEA process.
> Something about the collector is only 1 step and you still have to make
> a secure VPN connection to the LEA device for delivery and deliver in a
> format acceptable by the LEA. I have no idea the validity of this
> statement, but the concept of patent infringement and other FUD was
> thrown around during the discussion. Does OpenCALEA address these
> issues? Are they issues at all? Is this going to be a challenge for this
> project?

  First, my perspective is from someone just recently looking into
CALEA, and my boss pointed out the opencalea project to look at, which
I've started doing, while reading standards and what-not to try to
figure out what requirements our company has to meet, and trying to keep
in mind how we could get them met using OpenCALEA (well, more accurately
by helping develop OpenCALEA to meet them).  Manish or someone can
probably confirm or expound more, but I infer that OpenCALEA was started
as a project to ultimately meet these ends, and with some thought put
into the general design of the architecture, but the
details/implementation would be worked out largely with open source
community contributions and input.  I may be wrong, though.  I'm hoping
at least long term we can/will use OpenCALEA to meet our CALEA
requirements, but it is a very new project at the moment; hopefully it
grows quickly (and with good direction), but I'm guessing we may end up
with either a commercial solution or a just-in-time contract for the
short term.  We happen to provide voip service, so we have additional
requirements to meet (though I'm hoping eventually support can be added
to OpenCALEA to cover them as well) beyond those of just an "Internet
Access and Services Provider".

On Tue, 2007-03-20 at 10:23 -0500, Raw, Randy wrote:
> I talked to a TTP (take this for what it's worth), who said that
> OpenCALEA only addressed step 1 of 4 steps of the CALEA process.
> Something about the collector is only 1 step and you still have to make
> a secure VPN connection to the LEA device for delivery and deliver in a
> format acceptable by the LEA.

  I'll try to look at the calea requirements.  From what I've seen so
far, I gather things are geared towards doing a vpn connection to the
LEA over the internet, but that also depends on what you and the LEA
settle on for delivery of the data (ie. that's not the only option to
meet requirements).  With that in mind, a vpn connection would at least
currently (and probably long-term) be outside the scope of the OpenCALEA
programs; there are plenty of vpn flavors available, and most of them
are relatively easy to setup for something like this).  Manish had a
mention of encrypting the content to the LEA on a todo/wishlist
recently, which if done properly, with calea requirements met, could
maybe eliminate an external vpn piece entirely.

>  I have no idea the validity of this
> statement, but the concept of patent infringement and other FUD was
> thrown around during the discussion. Does OpenCALEA address these
> issues?

  Not currently, no - I've not looked at the new collector/controller
pieces, but so far it's just a packet sniffer that formats the data a
little.  You could do the same thing with tcpdump and some shell
scripts.  I think it's a great project, but it's new/incomplete at the
moment.

>  Are they issues at all? Is this going to be a challenge for this
> project?

  Good question... time will tell.



-- 
Jesse Norell - jesse@kci.net
Kentec Communications, Inc.