Re: [manet] DLEP-18 Security Considerations

[Henning Rogge <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 1:51 AM, Stan Ratliff <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Hello WG,
>
> As requested in the email thread earlier today, here's a snapshot of what we
> currently have in the upcoming DLEP-18 draft wrt security. We've put an
> additional paragraph in the Assumptions section (Sec. 2.1) that says:
>
>    The reliance on MAC addresses by DLEP forces the assumption that
>    participating DLEP peers are on a single segment (either physical or
>    logically, via tunneling protocols) at Layer 2.  DLEP further assumes
>    that security of the implementations (e.g., authentication of
>    stations, encryption of traffic, or both) is dealt with by by
>    utilizing Layer 2 security techniques.
>
>
> Additionally, here is the text in the "Security Considerations":
>
> 12.  Security Considerations
>
>    The potential security concerns when using DLEP are:
>
>    1.  An attacker might pretend to be a DLEP peer, either at DLEP
>        session initialization, or by injection of messages once a
>        session has been established, and/or
>
>    2.  DLEP data items could be altered by an attacker, causing the
>        receiving implementation to inappropriately alter its information
>        base concerning network status.
>
>    Since DLEP is restricted to operation over a single (possibly
>    logical) hop at layer 2, implementations requiring authentication
>    and/or encryption of traffic MUST take steps to secure the Layer 2
>    link.
>
>    To avoid potential denial of service attack, it is RECOMMENDED that
>    implementations using the Peer Discovery mechanism maintain an
>    information base of hosts that persistently fail Session
>    Initialization having provided an acceptable Discovery signal, and
>    ignore Peer Discovery signals from such hosts.
>
>    This specification does not address security of the data plane, as it
>    (the data plane) is not affected, and standard security procedures
>    can be employed.

Maybe we could also mention that the same MAC layer security
mechanisms that can protect the DLEP control traffic would also
protect the radio-router DATA plane traffic.

Henning Rogge