Re: [icnrg] IRTF Chair review of draft-irtf-icnrg-pathsteering-00

["David R. Oran" <[e-mail]>]

On 16 Apr 2023, at 18:07, Colin Perkins wrote:

> The ICNRG chairs have requested that draft-irtf-icnrg-pathsteering-00 
> be published as an RFC on the IRTF stream. The IRTF publication 
> process is described in RFC 5743, and comprises a review by the IRSG 
> to ensure technical and editorial quality, followed by a check by the 
> IESG to ensure the work does not conflict with IETF standards 
> activities.
>
> As IRTF Chair, I perform an initial review of all drafts submitted for 
> publication on the IRTF stream before sending them for detailed review 
> by the IRSG. This note provides my review comments, for discussion.
>
> Authors, please can you also respond to this message to confirm that 
> all necessary IPR disclosures, as described on 
> https://irtf.org/policies/ipr, have been made?
>
Confirmed. There is Cisco IPR as disclosed in 
https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/5643/

> Result: Ready with nits
>
> RFC 5743 compliance: The draft does not follow the guidelines in RFC 
> 5743
>
Fixed

> Comments:
> * The draft misses the RFC 5743 statements that it is not a produce of 
> the IETF and is not a standard, and around the degree of RG consensus 
> for publication.
>
Added.

> * Section 1.1 is clear that there are justifications for deploying 
> this experimental addition to the ICN protocols. It should perhaps 
> note that this is published to facilitate such experimentation, and 
> discuss what open questions remains and what might indicate success of 
> the experiment.
>
Added a paragraph suggesting what the useful experiments might be and 
what they should assess.

> * Are there any concerns due to the state needed to store and lookup 
> labels, perhaps when subject to malicious requests, and the rate at 
> which state times out?
>
The state in the forwarder is twofold:
- labels to identify each forwarding face. This is O(number of faces) 
and a small addition to the existing state needed to represent a face.
- Interest message data placed in the PIT. The path steering header does 
in fact inflate the sizeof the interest message and hence the PIT state, 
but not by an amount that we believe e is a concern. The forwarder needs 
to protect against state inflation attacks in general, and an attacker 
can mount one as or more easily just by either issuing interests with 
long names and/or Interest payload data.

I’m not sure this is important enough to warrant mentioning in the 
security considerations, but if you think it helpful to add a sentence 
or two, we can do that.

Ilia - care to weigh in on this (especially if I got something wrong!).

Colin: Once we close on this comment I’ll submit a draft update and 
hand it back over to you.


> Regards,
> Colin
>
>
>
> -- 
> Colin Perkins
> https://csperkins.org/
DaveO