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

[Colin Perkins <[e-mail]>]

Hi Dave,

[one brief comment inline]

On 20 Apr 2023, at 14:50, David R. Oran wrote:

> 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.

It doesn’t seems like it’s a significant concern, but since you’ve 
essentially written the necessary text above it wouldn’t hurt to 
include it.

Cheers,
Colin



> 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