Document Action: Robust ECN Signaling with Nonces to Experimental

[The IESG <[e-mail]>]

The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'Robust ECN Signaling with 
Nonces' <draft-ietf-tsvwg-tcp-nonce-04.txt> as an Experimental RFC.  
This document is the product of the Transport Area Working Group. The 
IESG contact persons are Scott Bradner and Allison Mankin. 

Technical Summary

This specification describes the ECN-nonce, an optional addition to 
Explicit Congestion Notification (RFC 3168) that protects against 
accidental or malicious concealment of marked packets from the TCP 
sender. It improves the robustness of congestion control by 
preventing receivers from exploiting ECN to gain an unfair share of 
network bandwidth. The ECN-nonce uses the two ECT codepoints in the 
ECN field of the IP header, and requires a flag in the TCP header. It 
is computationally efficient for both routers and hosts.

Working Group Summary 

The working group supported publishing of this document and the Last 
Call discussion of the document raised no issues with the quality 
of the document. 

Protocol Quality

There are implementations of the nonce algorithm and bits accompanying 
the implementations of RFC 3168, the Explicit Congestion Notification 
Proposed Standard. The specification was reviewed for the IESG by 
Allison Mankin and Randy Bush.


RFC Editor Note:

RFC-Editor, please add the following text after the Abstract:

Statement of Intent:

This specification contains an optional addition to Explicit
Congestion Notification (RFC 3168) improving its robustness
against malicious or accidental concealment of marked packets.
It has not been deployed widely. One goal of publication as an
as an Experimental RFC is to be prudent, and encourage use and
deployment prior to publication in the standards track. Another
consideration is to give time for firewall developers to accept
and recognize the pattern presented by the nonce. It is
the intent of the Transport Area to re-submit this specification
as an IETF Proposed Standard in future after more experience has
been gained.

RFC-Editor, please also expand the acronyms in the abstract on first
appearance:

Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN)
ECN-Capable Transport (ECT)