Re: [bess] Kathleen Moriarty's Discuss on draft-ietf-bess-mvpn-extranet-04: (with DISCUSS)

[Eric C Rosen <[e-mail]>]

On 12/17/2015 8:47 PM, Kathleen Moriarty wrote:
> I just have one question/request to improve the security consideration
> section.  The only security mentioned in this draft is what's called a
> "security violation", where traffic may go to the incorrect "VPN"
> endpoint.  If you are worried about traffic winding up in the wrong
> place, why is there no consideration for observing this traffic on the
> wire?  Since there is no encryption, wouldn't this also be a security
> consideration to call out specifically?
>
> Mention of the possibility of active attacks that could alter or tamper
> with the traffic or passive attacks that could observe the traffic as a
> risk due to lack of encryption (confidentiality protection) would help or
> a reason why this doesn't matter.
The reason I didn't mention this in the Security Considerations section 
is that the issues are not specific to Extranet MVPN, which is the topic 
of this document.   The Security Considerations section mentions those 
issues that could result in misdelivery of traffic if the procedures of 
the document are not properly executed; this set of issues is certainly 
within the scope of the document.

I understand that there are issues having to do with the possibility of 
observing or altering the traffic on the wire.  Certainly I could 
mention that the procedures of this document do not provide encryption, 
and hence do not by themselves ensure the privacy/integrity of the data 
against attacks on the backbone network.   Would that be sufficient?

I don't want to make any specific recommendations for mitigating those 
attacks, because:

- Issues of how to provide privacy/integrity for multicast traffic in 
general would seem to be out of scope for this document;

- Issues of how to provide privacy/integrity for various 
tunneling/encapsulation methods would seem to be out of scope for this 
document;

- Issues of how to provide privacy/integrity for the base L3VPN 
technology would seem to be out of scope for this document;

- Issues of how a Service Provider can protect its backbone network 
against various attacks would also seem to be out of scope for this 
document.