Re: [babel] WG Last Call on draft-ietf-babel-rfc6126bis-04.txt (10/29 - 11/17)

[Alia Atlas <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Nov 8, 2017 at 1:32 PM, james woodyatt <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Nov 8, 2017, at 07:41, Juliusz Chroboczek <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>
> "In particular, the bidirectional reachability detection in Babel is not
> a full handshake and does not offer any security guarantees (such as
> replay protection). Any security extensions to Babel need to take this
> into account."
>
>
> Singling out this particular property is misleading for many reasons.  It
> implies that this is the most serious vulnerability in unsecured Babel,
> which is simply not true.
>
>
> The current text of the Security Considerations section already offers an
> example of a vulnerability in unsecured Babel.
>
>    Any attacker can misdirect data traffic by advertising routes with a
>    low metric or a high seqno
>
>
> Which strikes me as rather more serious than replay attacks on the
> bidirectional reachability detection.
>
> In short, your suggestion makes the document less rather than more clear.
> I would therefore be opposed to adding such a sentence.
>
>
> Perhaps some compromise can be found by strengthening the admonition in
> the Security Considerations section to use a hop-to-hop security mechanism
> according to the deployment model, and to provide a more detail list of the
> vulnerabilities available when that security layer is breached.
>

I strongly agree.  At least a mandatory-to-implement hop-to-hop security
mechanism and what attacks it protects against is critical.

Regards,
Alia



> --james woodyatt <[e-mail]>
>
>
>
>
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