Re: [Idr] Magnus Westerlund's Discuss on draft-ietf-idr-tunnel-encaps-20: (with DISCUSS)

[John Scudder <[e-mail]>]

Hi Magnus,

For now I’d like to talk just about your zero-checksum point (quoted below but I’ll top-post my comments). It seems to me that the expected deployment model for tunnel-encaps, detailed in Section 11 and further strengthened after my discussion with Roman, exactly corresponds with "single administrative control” or "closely cooperating network administrations”. Here’s the Section 11 text from the current candidate version 21, after the modification:

   The Tunnel Encapsulation attribute is defined as a transitive
   attribute, so that it may be passed along by BGP speakers that do not
   recognize it.  However the Tunnel Encapsulation attribute MUST be
   used only within a well-defined scope, for example, within a set of
   Autonomous Systems that belong to a single administrative entity.

Whether it would be nice to add a “should we use UDP checksums or not” sub-TLV anyway, as an additional bell and whistle, is up for discussion. But I don’t think it’s mandated by RFC 7510.

Thanks,

—John

> On Dec 4, 2020, at 5:43 AM, Magnus Westerlund <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> My impression for example when it comes to zero-checksum for IPv6/UDP is used
> widely with little consideration about the potential issues. However, this work
> is done in a WG for inter domain routing. Thus, the general context is inter
> domain routing, and that pushes the zero-checkum usage from within a single
> domain into multiple ones. Thus, the risk for errors that checksum would detect
> is different and also the potential impact of failure to verify is different.
> Thus, there might actually exist a configuraiton need for this if one intended
> to pay attention to what might be written into the user plane specification.
> Here actually we do have an issue with RFC 7510:
> 
> So your document states: 
> 
>   MPLS-in-UDP [RFC7510] is also supported, but an
>   Encapsulation sub-TLV for it is not needed since there are no
>   additional parameters to be signaled.
> 
> While if you go read Section 3.1 of RFC 7510 it states the following in regards
> to zero-checksum:
> 
>   The UDP checksum MUST be implemented and MUST be used in accordance
>   with [RFC768] and [RFC2460] for MPLS-in-UDP traffic over IPv6 unless
>   one or more of the following exceptions applies and the additional
>   requirements stated below are complied with.  There are three
>   exceptions that allow use of UDP zero-checksum mode for IPv6 with
>   MPLS-in-UDP, subject to the additional requirements stated below in
>   this section.  The three exceptions are:
> 
>   a.  Use of MPLS-in-UDP in networks under single administrative
>       control (such as within a single operator's network) where it is
>       known (perhaps through knowledge of equipment types and lower-
>       layer checks) that packet corruption is exceptionally unlikely
>       and where the operator is willing to take the risk of undetected
>       packet corruption.
> 
>   b.  Use of MPLS-in-UDP in networks under single administrative
>       control (such as within a single operator's network) where it is
>       judged through observational measurements (perhaps of historic or
>       current traffic flows that use a non-zero checksum) that the
>       level of packet corruption is tolerably low and where the
>       operator is willing to take the risk of undetected packet
>       corruption.
> 
>   c.  Use of MPLS-in-UDP for traffic delivery for applications that are
>       tolerant of misdelivered or corrupted packets (perhaps through
>       higher-layer checksum, validation, and retransmission or
>       transmission redundancy) where the operator is willing to rely on
>       the applications using the tunnel to survive any corrupt packets.
> 
>   These exceptions may also be extended to the use of MPLS-in-UDP
>   within a set of closely cooperating network administrations (such as
>   network operators who have agreed to work together in order to
>   jointly provide specific services).  Even when one of the above
>   exceptions applies, use of UDP checksums may be appropriate when VPN
>   services are provided over MPLS-in-UDP; see Section 6.
> 
>   As such, for IPv6, the UDP checksum for MPLS-in-UDP MUST be used as
>   specified in [RFC768] and [RFC2460] for tunnels that span multiple
>   networks whose network administrations do not cooperate closely, even
>   if each non-cooperating network administration independently
>   satisfies one or more of the exceptions for UDP zero-checksum mode
>   usage with MPLS-in-UDP over IPv6.
> 
> So this indicate to me that there is a significant likelyhood that for the
> intended usage of these tunnel encapsulations would not qualify for the
> exceptions and should use checksums. If that needs signalling or not is the next
> question. That comes back to how the configuring node knows about capabilities
> and how one can resolve lack of a capability when signalled.