WG Action: Rechartered Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (bfd)

[The IESG <[e-mail]>]

The Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (bfd) working group in the Routing
Area of the IETF has been rechartered. For additional information please
contact the Area Directors or the WG Chairs.

Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (bfd)
------------------------------------------------
Current Status: Active WG

Chairs:
  Nobo Akiya <[e-mail]>
  Jeffrey Haas <[e-mail]>

Technical advisors:
  Dave Katz <[e-mail]>
  David Ward <[e-mail]>

Assigned Area Director:
  Adrian Farrel <[e-mail]>

Mailing list
  Address: [e-mail]
  To Subscribe: [e-mail]
  Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtg-bfd/

Charter:

The BFD Working Group is chartered to standardize and support the
bidirectional forwarding detection protocol (BFD) and its extensions.  A
core goal of the working group is to standardize BFD in the context of 
IP routing, or protocols such as MPLS that are based on IP routing, in a 
way that will encourage multiple, inter-operable vendor implementations. 

The Working Group will also provide advice and guidance on BFD to other 
working groups or standards bodies as requested.

BFD is a protocol intended to detect faults in the bidirectional path
between two forwarding engines, including physical interfaces,
subinterfaces, data link(s), and to the extent possible the forwarding
engines themselves, with potentially very low latency. It operates
independently of media, data protocols, and routing protocols. An
additional goal is to provide a single mechanism that can be used for
liveness detection over any media, at any protocol layer, with
a wide range of detection times and overhead, to avoid a proliferation
of different methods.

Important characteristics of BFD include:

- Simple, fixed-field encoding to facilitate implementations in 
  hardware.

- Independence of the data protocol being forwarded between two systems.
  BFD packets are carried as the payload of whatever encapsulating 
  protocol is appropriate for the medium and network.

- Path independence: BFD can provide failure detection on any kind of 
  path between systems, including direct physical links, virtual 
  circuits, tunnels, MPLS LSPs, multihop routed paths, and 
  unidirectional links (so long as there is some return path, of 
  course).

- Ability to be bootstrapped by any other protocol that automatically 
  forms peer, neighbor or adjacency relationships to seed BFD endpoint 
  discovery.

The working group is currently chartered to complete the following work
items:

1. Develop further MIB modules for BFD and submit them to the IESG for 
publication as Proposed Standards.

2a. Provide a generic keying-based cryptographic authentication 
mechanism for the BFD protocol developing the work of the KARP
working group.  This mechanism  will support authentication through
a key identifier for the BFD session's Security Association rather
than specifying new authentication extensions.  

2b. Provide extensions to the BFD MIB in support of the generic keying-
based cryptographic authentication mechanism.

2c. Specify cryptographic authentication procedures for the BFD protocol
using HMAC-SHA-256 (possibly truncated to a smaller integrity check 
value but not beyond commonly accepted lengths to ensure security) using 
the generic keying-based cryptographic authentication mechanism.

3. Provide an extension to the BFD core protocol in support of point-to-
multipoint links and networks.

4. Provide an informational document to recommend standardized timers 
and timer operations for BFD when used in different applications.

5. Define a mechanism to perform single-ended path (i.e. continuity)
verification based on the BFD specification.  Allow such a mechanism to 
work both proactively and on-demand, without prominent initial delay.  
Allow the mechanism to maintain multiple sessions to a target entity and 
between the same pair of network entities. In doing this work, the WG 
will work closely with at least the following other WGs: ISIS, OSPF, 
SPRING.

The working group will maintain a relationship with the MPLS working
group.

Milestones:
  Done     - Submit the base protocol specification to the IESG to be
considered as a Proposed Standard
  Done     - Submit BFD encapsulation and usage profile for single-hop
IPv4 and IPv6 adjacencies to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed
Standard
  Done     - Submit BFD encapsulation and usage profile for MPLS LSPs to
the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard
  Done     - Submit BFD encapsulation and usage profile for multi-hop
IPv4 and IPv6 adjacencies to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed
Standard
  Done     - Submit the BFD MIB to the IESG to be considered as a
Proposed Standard
  Done     - Submit the BFD over LAG mechanism to the IESG to be
considered as a Proposed Standard
  Jun 2014 - Submit the the document on BFD point-to-multipoint support
to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard
  Nov 2014 - Submit the BFD MPLS extension MIB to the IESG to be
considered as a Proposed Standard
  Jan 2015 - Submit the generic keying based cryptographic authentication
mechanism to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard
  Jan 2015 - Submit a BFD MIB extension in support of the generic keying
document to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard
  Jan 2015 - Submit the cryptographic authentication procedures for BFD
to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard
  Jan 2015 - Submit the BFD Common Intervals document to the IESG to be
considered as an Informational RFC