[Masque] Unifying CONNECT-IP Proposals

[David Schinazi <[e-mail]>]

Hi MASQUE Enthusiasts,

As you know, we've had two distinct proposals for CONNECT-IP for a while.
While
both of them have interesting features, we need to unify on a joint effort
if
we want to make progress. In order to further that goal, we've made some
edits
to the existing documents in order to create a unified coherent path
forward.

First, we updated draft-ietf-masque-ip-proxy-reqs to reflect working group
consensus: since the WGLC showed consensus on everything except the
network-to-network use-case and the route negotiation requirement, both of
those were removed from the document. draft-ietf-masque-ip-proxy-reqs-03 [1]
now better reflects the working group's choice.

Based on these requirements, and on the WG consensus at IETF 110 to focus on
Proxying IP Packets, we also updated draft-cms-masque-connect-ip. We removed
all routing-related features and now draft-cms-masque-connect-ip-02 [2]
contains solely what is needed to satisfy the WG's requirements from
draft-ietf-masque-ip-proxy-reqs-03. We've had some interesting conversations
with Tommy Pauly on this topic and would love for him to join us as editor
on
draft-cms-masque-connect-ip.

Additionally, the discussion at IETF 111 showed that folks were also
interested
in various features that didn't have WG consensus: some are interested in
negotiating routing and some are interested in flow forwarding. We believe
that
both of those are interesting features worth pursuing. The best way to
accomplish this is through extensions. Luckily CONNECT-IP is extensible.

We wrote up the routing negotiation as an extension in
draft-cms-masque-connect-ip-ext-routes [3]. This enables split-tunnel VPN
and
the network-to-network use-case.

We also made sure that flow forwarding mode would work as an extension, and
as
proof-of-concept wrote it up as draft-tbd-masque-connect-ip-ext-flow [4]. As
mentioned in that document, this is mostly copied from
draft-kuehlewind-masque-connect-ip-01 [5] with some minor modifications. We
would like to have the authors of draft-kuehlewind-masque-connect-ip author
this extension, given that they produced the interesting ideas in it.

We think this refactor would be a great path forward for the MASQUE working
group: it would allow us to unify multiple proposals around a common
extensible
protocol. We did discuss merging these three documents into one, but decided
against it because it would unnecessarily delay the publication of
CONNECT-IP.
We would love for the working group to adopt both extensions as they will
influence the design of CONNECT-IP, but both need to solve some specific
hard
problems that don't need to delay CONNECT-IP, so they deserve their own
drafts.

As usual, comments and thoughts are most welcome!

Thanks,
David

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-masque-ip-proxy-reqs-03
[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-cms-masque-connect-ip-02
[3]
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-cms-masque-connect-ip-ext-routes-00
[4]
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-tbd-masque-connect-ip-ext-flow-00
[5]
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-kuehlewind-masque-connect-ip-01