The IESG wrote:
The IESG has received a request from the Global Routing Operations WG
(grow) to consider the following document:
- 'BLACKHOLE BGP Community for Blackholing'
<draft-ietf-grow-blackholing-00.txt> as Proposed Standard
The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
final comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the
ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org mailing lists by 2016-07-04. Exceptionally, comments
may be
sent to iesg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org instead. In either case, please retain the
beginning of the Subject line to allow automated sorting.
There has been no discussion on the GROW mailing list about having this
document published as Standards Track rather than informational and it's
coming as a surprise to see that this was only announced at IESG Last
Call a couple of days ago. At the least, there ought to be some
discussion about this before pushing it up into the publication queue.
Personally - and I say this as an IXP operator who has had yet another
week-end ruined due to prolonged DDoS problems on an IXP fabric - I
don't think this is an appropriate document for standards track, or even
for publication as an RFC. The reason for this is that section 3.4
creates the expectation that IXPs could or should be involved in
facilitating blackholing of IP addresses.
The problem is layer 9: if a mechanism of this form is standardised, it
will be viewed by governments, courts and law-enforcement a centralised
big red button which can be pressed at will to block IP access to their
bêtes-noires du jour. And it turns out that there are lots of things
that governments, courts and LEAs don't like, ranging from file sharing
to witchcraft (one of the default blocking categories in the UK) to
youtube (lots of countries) to google (france), to whatever. It's not
just DDoS that will be targeted here.
The proposal itself has raised an unusual level of disquiet among the
IXP community, which seems to be split down the middle about whether
standardising blackhole communities in an RFC is a good idea or not.
Some IXPs think it's great. Others think it's a terrible idea. For
sure, there is no consensus about this in the IXP world.
Nick