Hi Brian,
On Fri, 11 Apr 2008, Brian Adamson wrote:
I appreciate your comments here. I plan to issue a new version of the draft
that addresses these to the extent I can. I have some questions about your
concerns with comments in-line below:
Thanks for your quick response. Below I won't quote all the text if
additional clarification doesn't seem warranted.
But this is certainly not a "fully-baked" area. So [router
assistance] discussion _could_ be removed ... I suppose it will
persist in the RFC 3941 for historical purposes until there is
further interest in the area?
That would be my preference.
In fact, the U.S. Postal Service has used a NACK-based protocol to deliver
bulk data content to a group of 10,000 - 20,000 receivers in a single
multicast group over a fairly limited IP-based VSAT delivery system. This
system was (and still is as far as I know) been used operationally on a daily
basis for more than 5 years.
One of the references for this document is some work I did to assess (and to
predict) the volume of feedback of these types of protocols with group sizes
through this scale.
I can probably provide more clarification on the impact ... erring on the
large size may add some extra latency to the NACK-based reliability process
and require more buffering in the implementation to maintain state.
Some clarification would be great, as well as an explicit reference
as, if you say, this number has already been tested and found to be
working, and have caused no ill effects in other scales.
The details how one might apply IPsec to the unicast channel are absent.
I'm not commenting on the multicast delivery part because that is somewhat
covered though details are fuzzy. Unicast has two major issues that I did
not see clearly addressed:
1) malicious, misconfigured or under-performing (beyond small capacity
links etc.) receivers. Is there even a way to differentiate between
these classes of receivers? When these send a lot of NACK feedback,
progress of the stream is deterred. How do you deal with this issue
(this is partly operations, protocol, and security problem)?
This is an issue. I did try to point out that (but perhaps still too subtly)
in the "Security Considerations" section. The idea in the text there was to
point out that SSM operation eliminates direct receiver<->receiver messaging,
simplifying security such that only the sender need to authenticate/trust
receiver operations. For the case of IPsec, that means the sender
implementation may have alot of Security Association state depending upon
group size. But I thought it beyond the scope of this "Building Block"
document to go into the details of this. It should more thoroughly addressed
in any "Protocol Instantiations" that are made.
I have a bad feeling that protocol instatiations will not be able to
develop a deployable security model based on this approach, or if it's
done, the security models will be different for each protocol
instantiation...
2) receiver authentication for the feedback back-channel; how could you
do it? This seems unfeasible in practise if the expected default
group sizes (e.g. the recommended default of 10,000 receivers) would
be realized.
There indeed may be practical limitations on group size due to security. I
suppose it is comparable to a server that would need maintain alot of
simultaneous secure TCP connections? But again I am not sure it is in the
scope of the NACK Building Block document to predict scalability limits of
IPsec implementations? But I suppose that some language could be added to
point out these issues. Would that address your concerns here?
While the number of 10,000 IPsec SAs already seems to be a significant
number, I'm more concerned about what else is required, especially
what's required to bring up these SAs. You will need some key
exchange protocol, like IKEv2. That's probably around 4-10 round
trips per receiver to signal the SAs (and more to keep it running).
But even more challenging, you will require some mechanism to identify
the good receivers (and the receivers need to identify the sources,
but that's likely easier) and tie that to the security association.
What would be that mechanism? Each source having a shared secret with
each receiver would likely could prove a provisioning challenge. Or
you could generate each receiver a certificate and build a local
certificate authority but that only works if all the receivers are
under your management. Or there could be some other mechanism.
draft-ietf-rmt-sec-discussion already provides a lot of good analysis
on security aspects of RMT work. Too bad it isn't referenced here and
that it isn't finished yet. Yet, when draft-ietf-rmt-sec-discussion
discusses solutions, I don't see how it addresses some of the problems
specific to this document, e.g., receiver-based attacks
(authenticating and securing the feedback return channel; how to
ensure the reports are valid even if they come from an authenticated
receiver).
I'd like to see that draft referenced here. It's not clear to me
whether it would be reasonable to ask that this document should not go
forward until sec-discussion goes forward; if that is not reasonable,
I believe this document's security considerations needs some
additional work especially wrt the unicast feedback channel; section
6.1.1 and its subsections already discusses the multicast part in some
detail (I'm not qualified to evaluate whether that's sufficient), but
while the first paragraph mentions unicast, it is not obvious whether
it's fully covered in the text that follows.
--
Pekka Savola "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings
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