Re: [Idr] AD Review of draft-ietf-idr-bgp-extended-messages-20

[Thomas Mangin <[e-mail]>]

 Hello,

I just noticed that I tried to re-invent
draft-ietf-idr-ext-opt-param [1] on grow. For people not on both list,
here are the summary of what I found.

At least one implementation seen
in the wild (read ExaBGP) is buggy and do not check the "Optional
Parameters Length", parsing the rest of the OPEN buffer without
truncating
it.

https://github.com/Exa-Networks/exabgp/blob/974f97fc6be63f0b05755ffc3e1ea69a02c0505b/lib/exabgp/bgp/message/open/capability/capabilities.py#L159

While
I now fixed the bug, using 255 as a values and expecting the speaker to
handle this number as "magical" may break some deployment down the
line.

While I can only apologise for letting such a error in my code, I
would assume that more than one "home brewed" implementation may perform
bad or lazy OPEN parsing and that therefore the draft as written would
at some point break some currently working BGP session.

I therefore
proposed on grow an alternative way to encode the extended length within
a capability - total or extra bytes after the initial value in the 1
bytes length, and asking new implementation to make sure that the data
within the one byte length remains valid.
This approach does not change
at all the parsing of the current OPEN and for buggy implementation
ignoring the length (parsing the whole payload - like ExaBGP did), it
will continue to work, this change is transparent.

However this change
would not allow to extend an individual capability size (from one byte
to two) the way the current encoding propose, it would however allow
partial capability exchange between a speaker aware of the extension (if
this is a good or bad thing is surely up to debate).

I also realise
that it may be several years before the extended encoding, even if
available today, is required due to the growth of the OPEN size. I am
therefore only pointing this issue to the list for information so that
the author can decide if they consider this scenario as probable and
worthy of consideration or not.

Sincerely,

Thomas

On 2017-03-07
23:51, Enke Chen wrote: 

>
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-idr-ext-opt-param/
[1]draft-ietf-idr-ext-opt-param-05
 

Links:
------
[1]
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-idr-ext-opt-param/