Re: [Dots] Mirja's DISCUSS: Pending Point (AD Help Needed)

["Konda, Tirumaleswar Reddy" <[e-mail]>]

Hi Ben,

There seems to several confusions regarding the heartbeat mechanism, I will try to address all the comments/Discuss from you, Mirja and Valery below:

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7252 is specific to UDP transport (and does not deal with TCP). Please see the first paragraph in https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7252#section-3. The message transmission parameters (max-retransmit, ack-timeout and ack-random-factor) and missing-hb-allowed discussed in DOTS signal channel are specific to UDP transport.

[2] CoAP over TCP is discussed in https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8323. Please see the following differences b/w CoAP-over UDP and CoAP-over-TCP relevant to our discussion:

a) CoAP ping/pong defined in RFC7252 (uses Empty confirmable message and reset) will not work for CoAP-over-TCP. As per https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8323#section-3.4, Empty messages (Code 0.00) can always be sent and MUST be ignored by the recipient. CoAP-over-TCP defines its own CoAP ping/pong for connection health (see https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8323#section-5.4).  

b)Confirmable  and Non-confirmable message types are specific to UDP, and are not supported in CoAP-over-TCP.

[3] For TCP, if no ack is received for CoAP ping for specific duration, TCP will close the connection, and the DOTS client will have to re-establish the TCP connection. missing-hb-allowed is of no use for TCP. We are all in the same page for TCP, and the draft can probably 
      be updated for better clarity.

[4] Now coming to UDP, please see my responses below:

a) As you already know, DOTS signal channel uses heartbeat exchange in both directions, and hence CoAP ping is sent by both DOTS client and server.
b) CoAP ping is a confirmable message and hence the exponential back-off with the default value of MAX_RETRANSMIT is 4 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7252#section-4.8).
c) CoAP ping is the only confirmable message exchanged during attack (all other messages exchanged during an attack are non-confirmable).  The specification allows distinct values for message transmission parameters and missing-hb-allowed to be used during attack and peace times.

To handle congestion conditions during an attack, the specification allows two options:

[Option a] By setting MAX_RETRANSMIT to 1, exponential-back off is avoided and missing-hb-allowed set to a very higher value (e.g. 20) to handle congestion (high packet loss). The draft can be updated to explain [Option a] in more detail.
[Option b] The CoAP MAX_RETRANSMIT default value of 4 is not modified, and for example, missing-hb-allowed can be set to 5 (since 4 transmits are not sufficient to detect the peer is not alive during congestion). 

The Discuss from Mirja is not to rely on the CoAP ping/pong but to define it in the DOTS layer itself (please see https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dots/V6vv28zDpdY5eR_kaB7L-60bhkk) and suggested to go with an alternate design using non-confirmable messages. The alternate design won't work is our assessment, please see my response https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dots/QRMfsmhPTFksN6a_nBBKimVx-lM 

Cheers,
-Tiru

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dots <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Benjamin Kaduk
> Sent: Sunday, July 21, 2019 9:35 AM
> To: Valery Smyslov <[e-mail]>
> Cc: [e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: [Dots] Mirja's DISCUSS: Pending Point (AD Help Needed)
> 
> This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or
> open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is
> safe.
> 
> Hi Valery,
> 
> On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 02:42:50PM +0300, Valery Smyslov wrote:
> > Hi Med,
> >
> > I believe Mirja's main point was that if you use liveness check
> > mechanism in the transport layer, then if it reports that liveness check fails,
> then it _also_ closes the transport session.
> >
> > Quotes from her emails:
> > "Yes, as Coap Ping is used, the agent should not only conclude that the
> DOTS signal session is disconnected but also the Coap session and not send
> any further Coap messages anymore."
> >
> > and
> >
> > "Actually to my understanding this will not work. Both TCP heartbeat and
> Coap Ping are transmitted reliably. If you don’t receive an ack for these
> transmissions you are not able to send any additional messages and can only
> close the connection."
> >
> > I'm not familiar with CoAP, but I suspect she's right about TCP - if
> > TCP layer itself doesn't receive ACK for the sent data after several
> retransmissions, the connection is closed.
> 
> Thanks for this crisp summary (and thanks Med for the detailed writeup as
> well)!
> 
> > As far as I understand the current draft allows underlying liveness
> > check to fail and has a parameter to restart this check several times
> > if this happens. It seems that a new transport session will be created
> > in this case (at least if TCP is used). In my reading of the draft
> > this seems not been assumed, it is assumed that the session remains the
> same. So, I think that main Mirja's concern is that it won't work (at least with
> TCP).
> 
> My sense is similar; if I could attempt to summarize Mirja's stance, it's that
> we're invoking a transport-level feature that does its own retransmit and
> backoff, but then if the transport comes back and says "the peer is gone", we
> say "but we're under attack, so I don't believe you; try again".
> This kicks of another independent set of "retransmits" (I know it's not
> technically the right word) with a fresh exponential backoff.  There's two
> complaints about this: (1) we're changing the transport, since if the transport
> concludes the peer is gone then the transport "normally" tears down the
> connection (*) entirely, and (2) the assembly of (exponential backoff 1),
> (exponential backoff 2), (exponential backoff 2) is strange pacing, and might
> be better served by a similar number of "retransmits" but with different
> pacing, since the long delay at the end of each backoff period is not expected
> to add a huge amount of value in terms of letting congestion ease during
> attack time, and we would be just as well served by capping the delay
> between retransmits and having more retransmits.
> 
> The asterisk on (1) is of course because, as is noted later in the thread, only
> TCP tears down the association when it concludes the peer is gone (assuming
> I'm reading the right parts of 7252).  Quoting 7252:
> 
>                                                         If the
>    retransmission counter reaches MAX_RETRANSMIT on a timeout, or if the
>    endpoint receives a Reset message, then the attempt to transmit the
>    message is canceled and the application process informed of failure.
>    On the other hand, if the endpoint receives an acknowledgement in
>    time, transmission is considered successful.
> 
> So all CoAP does is to tell the application "that request didn't work", but CoAP
> is happy to try additional requests on the connection; the teardown logic is
> indeed left up to the application.
> 
> I'm not sure that we've seen much discussion about (2), though (sorry if I
> missed it) -- why is the repeated backoff-and-restart the right pacing for this
> purpose?
> 
> -Ben
> 
> > I didn't participate in the WG discussion on this, so I don't know
> > what was discussed regarding this issue. If it was discussed and the
> > WG has come to conclusion that this is not an issue, then I believe
> > more text should be added to the draft so, that people like Mirja, who
> didn't participate in the discussion, don't have any concerns while reading the
> draft.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Valery.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: [e-mail]
> > > <[e-mail]>
> > > Sent: Friday, July 19, 2019 9:57 AM
> > > To: Benjamin Kaduk ([e-mail]) <[e-mail]>; dots-
> > > [e-mail]; [e-mail]
> > > Subject: Mirja's DISCUSS: Pending Point (AD Help Needed)
> > >
> > > Hi Ben, chairs, all,
> > >
> > > (restricting the discussion to the AD/chairs/WG)
> > >
> > > * Status:
> > >
> > > All DISCUSS points from Mirja's review were fixed, except the one
> > > discussed in this message.
> > >
> > > * Pending Point:
> > >
> > > Rather than going into much details, I consider the following as the
> > > summary of the remaining DISCUSS point from Mirja:
> > >
> > > > I believe there are flaws in the design. First it’s a layer
> > > > violation, but if more an idealistic concern but usually designing
> > > > in layers is a good approach. But more importantly, you end up
> > > > with un-frequent messages which may still terminate the connection
> > > > at some point, while what you want is to simply send messages
> > > > frequently in an unreliable fashion but a low rate until the attack is over.
> > >
> > > * Discussion:
> > >
> > > (1) First of all, let's remind that RFC7252 does not define how CoAP
> > > ping must be used. It does only say:
> > >
> > > ==
> > >       Provoking a Reset
> > >       message (e.g., by sending an Empty Confirmable message) is also
> > >       useful as an inexpensive check of the liveness of an endpoint
> > >       ("CoAP ping").
> > > ==
> > >
> > > How the liveness is assessed is left to applications. So, there is
> > > ** no layer violation **.
> > >
> > > (2) What we need isn't (text from Mirja):
> > >
> > > > to simply send messages frequently in an unreliable fashion but a
> > > > low rate until the attack is over "
> > >
> > > It is actually the other way around. The spec says:
> > >
> > >   "... This is particularly useful for DOTS
> > >    servers that might want to reduce heartbeat frequency or cease
> > >    heartbeat exchanges when an active DOTS client has not requested
> > >    mitigation."
> > >
> > > What we want can be formalized as:
> > >  - Taking into account DDoS traffic conditions, a check to assess
> > > the liveness of the peer DOTS agent + maintain NAT/FW state on on-path
> devices.
> > >
> > > An much more elaborated version is documented in SIG-004 of RFC 8612.
> > >
> > > * My analysis:
> > >
> > > - The intended functionality is naturally provided by existing CoAP
> messages.
> > > - Informed WG decision: The WG spent a lot of cycles when specifying
> > > the current behavior to be meet the requirements set in RFC8612.
> > > - Why not an alternative design: We can always define messages with
> > > duplicated functionality, but that is not a good design approach
> > > especially when there is no evident benefit.
> > > - The specification is not broken: it was implemented and tested.
> > >
> > > And a logistic comment: this issue fits IMHO under the non-discuss
> > > criteria in https://www.ietf.org/blog/discuss-criteria-iesg-review/#stand-
> undisc.
> > >
> > > * What's Next?
> > >
> > > As an editor, I don't think a change is needed but I'd like to hear
> > > from Ben, chairs, and the WG.
> > >
> > > Please share your thoughts and whether you agree/disagree with the
> > > above analysis.
> > >
> > > Cheers,
> > > Med
> >
> 
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