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RE: [Idr] Review of draft-ietf-idr-sla-exchange-10

2017-02-22 07:38:51
David: 

Thank you for the review.  The authors will respond to you on these issues. 

Sue 

-----Original Message-----
From: Idr [mailto:idr-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of David Black
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2017 5:32 PM
To: tsv-art(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Cc: idr(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org; 
draft-ietf-idr-sla-exchange(_dot_)all(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org; 
ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: [Idr] Review of draft-ietf-idr-sla-exchange-10

Reviewer: David Black
Review result: Not Ready

I've reviewed this document as part of the transport area directorate's
ongoing effort to review key IETF documents. These comments were written
primarily for the transport area directors, but are copied to the document's
authors for their information and to allow them to address any issues
raised. When done at the time of IETF Last Call, the authors should consider
this review together with any other last-call comments they receive. Please
always CC tsv-art(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org if you reply to or forward this review.

Document: draft-ietf-idr-sla-10
Reviewer: David Black
Review Date: February 21, 2017

Review result: Not Ready

This is an early TSV-ART review of a working group draft, requested by the
IDR Working Group.

This draft defines an extension to BGP to allow exchange of traffic handling
parameters (e.g., configured rates, burst sizes, drop thresholds).  While
this is a useful area of technology to standardize across network operators,
this draft has significant problems, and parts of it could use some serious
rethought.

This reviewer has discussed small portions of this draft with some of the
authors in the past, but this is his first comprehensive reading and review
of the draft.

Major Issues:

[1] The draft is misnamed.  This is not an SLA (Service Level
Agreement) draft - it's a TCA (Traffic Conditioning Agreement) draft - see
the definition of TCA in RFC 2475.  This draft should start from that
definition and generalize the applicability of TCA beyond Diffserv.  Large
areas of SLA content are not covered by this draft - for more details, see
the Wikipedia article on SLA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-level_agreement .

[2] Section 3.3.2.1's reuse of the TSpec construct from RFC 2115 to specify
a token bucket is a good idea, but it's not a good idea to respecify that
construct in terms of L2 (link-layer, e.g., Ethernet) octets, as the RFC
2115 TSpec is specified in terms of IP octets. 
This change to specification in terms of L2 octets results in needing the
L2_OVERHEAD TLV to cope with the possible differences in L2 (link) framing
overhead at sender and receiver of this information.  The TSpec should be
respecified at the IP layer, with L2 framing overhead left to the Producer
and Consumer to factor into their calculations based on each's direct
knowledge of L2 functionality and configuration in the local AS.  That ought
to enable elimination of the L2_OVERHEAD TLV, thereby reducing complexity.

[3] A token bucket should have two rate-related marking parameters based on
its token fill rate, i.e., min-rate, not the four rate-related marking
parameters in this draft.  The max-rate parameters in sections 3.3.2.5-6
ought to be specified against a second token bucket.  In addition, the
handling precedence algorithm in section 3.3.2.7 is an overly complex way to
specify the relationship of two token buckets.  All of this is even more
important, because max-rate, as defined in RFC 2115, is only applicable to
bursting - that max-rate for bursting often turns out to be an interface
line rate, which is not generally useful for the traffic provisioning
purposes of this draft.

The following should be done instead:
        - Define TSpecs for two token buckets, a primary/committed token
bucket
                and a secondary/peak token bucket that MUST be nested, i.e.,
traffic
                that is in-profile for the secondary/peak token bucket is
always
                in-profile for the primary/committed token bucket.  Some of
the details
                of how to specify this are subtle, see RFC 2698 for a worked
example.
                Use of a secondary/peak token bucket requires use of the
primary/
                committed token bucket, but a primary/committed token bucket
can be used
                without a secondary/peak token bucket.
        - For a single token bucket, define two handling TLVs, Committed (in
profile) and
                Excess (out of profile).
        - For two token buckets, define three handling TLVs, Committed (in
profile for both
                token buckets), Peak (out of profile for primary/committed
token bucket, but in
                profile for secondary/peak token bucket) and Excess (out of
profile for both
                token buckets).
NB: Could use Green/Yellow/Red terms instead of Committed/Peak/Excess terms.

[4] The drop threshold TLV in section 3.3.2.8 is not specified sufficiently
to be implemented interoperably.  For example, I don't understand what an
implementation is supposed to do when it receives 3 drop thresholds.

[5] The relative priority TLV in section 3.3.2.9 has the same insufficient
specification problem as the drop threshold TLV, compounded by a functional
incompleteness problem - if the recipient is using a weighted packet
transmission scheduler (e.g., WRR), priorities cannot be used to configure
that scheduler.  Hence, some specification of weights and scheduling
algorithms that use weights needs to be added.

[6] I have no idea what the sub-traffic classes TLV in section
3.3.2.10 is supposed to do, as that TLV is specified based on "Traffic Class
TLVs" which is an undefined term in this draft (e.g., that term is not used
outside of section 3.3.2.10.

[7] This draft's QoS contents need to be functionally aligned with
work-in-progress on YANG QoS models, in order to provide some assurance that
that this draft is implementable for actual network switch/router data
paths.  The current acknowledgement of the existence of YANG, NETCONF and
RESTConf at the end of Section 1 does not suffice.

[8] There are significant complexity and correctness problems caused by the
option to not specify the Source AS - e.g., Section 3.2 defines an SLA ID as
an "identifier which is unique in the scope of Source AS"
which is meaningless if there is no Source AS.  It would be simpler to
always specify Source AS, even in the point-to-point case.

[9] In section 3.2, the "intended for the peer receiver of the BGP UPDATE
message" text in the specification of bit 0 of the SLA Subtype flags is
unclear.  I suspect that this is intended to differentiate the two usages
described in sections 4.1.1 (Point-to-Point) and 4.1.2 (Multiple Hops), in
which case the parenthesized terms (or similar
terminology) should be used with cross-references to those two sections.

[10] There needs to be a coherent discussion in one place about how SLA
advertisement, update and withdrawal work.  A single ADVERTISE method may
suffice on the wire, but the details on how initial advertisement,
subsequent advertisement (update) and withdrawal work need to be specified
in one place.  The third paragraph of Section 4 is a start on this material,
but it's too terse; it should be expanded into its own subsection, and moved
earlier to come before the ADVERTISE method in Section 3.2.  This text from
Section 3.2 should be moved into that new subsection and likewise expanded:

      If an advertised SLA ID is different from earlier advertised one,
      for the same prefix and from the same Source AS, indicates Source
      AS is advertising new SLA Content to replace the previous one
      advertised with the same SLA ID.

In addition, I wonder whether functionality should be added to allow
withdrawal of an advertisement by specifying its SLA ID, although that was
not part of the original design.

[11] Notions of context for interpretation of all the IPFIX parameters in
3.3.1 need to be added, e.g.:
        - The first three parameters (DSCP, MPLS EXP field in top label,
802.1q priority) can
                and do vary on a link-by-link or LSP-by-LSP basis along a
traffic's network path.
        - The IP address parameters are rather likely to be VPN-specific
when there's more
                than one BGP/MPLS VPN that spans or transits the ASs
involved.
        - The transport port parameters need specification of which
transport header and where it
                is located (e.g., for TCP traffic carried by in VXLAN, is
this the inner TCP header
                or the outer UDP header in VXLAN).
There are probably simple approaches to specifying context in all cases, but
that context does need to be specified ... in all cases.

[12] The security considerations (section 10) are severely incomplete and
insufficient:

        - Discussion of possible abuse of this BGP option for
denial-of-service and theft-of-service,
                needs to be added, including possible countermeasures and
mitigations.

        - This sentence at the end of the second paragraph in Section 10 is
content-free:

                   It is NOT RECOMMENDED to enable this attribute at the
                   scale of the Internet unless if means to prevent leaking
sensitive
                   information are enforced.

                What exactly is an implementer or admin supposed to do?  How
does one
                figure out whether an implementation or deployment is  "at
the scale
                of the Internet" ??

        - The next to last paragraph in section 10 is almost content-free,
as it leaves
                decisions on implementation and deployment of key security
functionality as
                "an exercise for the reader" - that's not acceptable.

        - Last, but not least, the final paragraph in Section 10 is a joke
that will
                be lost on a security directorate reviewer - to understand
why, see
                Section 2 of RFC 6919, and take note of the publication date
of RFC 6919.

------------------------

Having noted a dozen major issues, I'll end the review here for now, as I
believe a serious revision of the draft is called for, which would be a
better starting point to review for minor issues and editorial items.

--------------------------------------------------------
David L. Black, Distinguished Engineer
Dell EMC, 176 South St., Hopkinton, MA  01748
+1 (508) 293-7953     Cell: +1 (978) 394-7754
David(_dot_)Black(_at_)dell(_dot_)com  <=== NEW ===
--------------------------------------------------------



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