Re: [Idr] WG LC for draft-ietf-idr-bgp-ls-segment-routing-ext-04 (March 7 to March 21)

[Jeffrey Haas <[e-mail]>]

Ketan,

On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 02:50:43AM +0000, Ketan Talaulikar (ketant) wrote:
> > There are a number of TLV value fields that may be of variable lengths.  In many cases, those lengths are inherited from the underlying IGP documents.
> > What is not documented is the behavior when the TLV is well formed but has unexpected length values.  Two simple examples:
> > - Prefix Attribute Flag TLV; varies by IGP
> > - Preference TLV; must be 1.
> > 
> > Do we treat this as malformed?  Do we ignore the sub-tlv?
> [KT] I believe this is clarified in the base BGP-LS spec
> (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7752#section-6.2.2). Do we need to
> clarify/call out anything extra in this specific document? IMHO it would
> be rather complex for BGP implementation (e.g. transit routers which do
> not understand or consume all these TLVs) to do semantic checking on these
> large set of TLVs being introduced in BGP-LS. This is something that could
> be left to the actual consumer of the information (e.g.
> controllers/applications). When a specific sub-TLV is using a wrong length
> (or have some other semantic error), it could be ignored by the consumer.
> This would apply to BGP-LS in general and not a specific
> document/extension.

My interpretation of the above citation is "the PDU is syntactically well
formed".  The issue here is when it's semantically incorrect.

I agree with you that this is likely a more general BGP-LS issue, but don't
see appropriate guidance in the base spec either.

While your point is "let the consumers decide", sometimes those consumers
are simply deserializing the data directly into structures in BGP for
external consumption.  I.e., they are not opaque.  Thus, the semantic
validation has relevance in general.

Frankly, this has the possible feel of a attack vector on BGP-LS speakers.

-- Jeff