Re: [Ioam] Internal WG Review: In-situ OAM (ioam)

[Stewart Bryant <[e-mail]>]

On 10/02/2017 15:19, Carlos Pignataro (cpignata) wrote:
>> On Feb 10, 2017, at 9:58 AM, Adrian Farrel <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>>>> 1) I'm sure there are good things one can do with such
>>>>> marking, but it is very unclear to me how this proposal
>>>>> doesn't also fall afoul of all the privacy downsides of
>>>>> the SPUD/PLUS proposal. My understanding of those privacy
>>>>> downsides was that any generic/extensible marking scheme
>>>>> (whether of packets or transport connections/flows) could
>>>>> easily be abused in many privacy unfriendly ways. Note
>>>>> that I'm not claiming there is IETF consensus on that
>>>>> but I do claim it was a significant issue for SPUD/PLUS
>>>>> and would like to know why (and hope) it is not an issue
>>>>> here. Can someone help me understand what's different here
>>>>> so we avoid that same kind of mega-debate?
>>> Note that this proposal concerns itself with OAM information, and not as a
>>> generic container for all-things. It is not for application information.
>> Hmmm.
>> Once you define a channel to carry other stuff along with data packets it will be used for purposes as yet undreamed of.
> I understand that — which is true pretty much for any new protocol field.
>
> I was curious to see if there were more specifics on the PLUS discussion beyond this that particularly apply to IOAM.

Adrian is correct here, but short of a breakthrough in cryptography that 
allows the use of  homomorphic encryption at speed with small payloads, 
we sit on the horns of a dilemma between enhancing the legitimate 
observability of a network for management purposes and enhancing the 
observability for nefarious purposes. Perhaps the answer is to require 
all phys to include encryption?

Stewart