[OPSEC] Iotdir early review of draft-ietf-opsec-v6-21

[Ted Lemon via Datatracker <[e-mail]>]

Reviewer: Ted Lemon
Review result: On the Right Track

This is a review of draft-ietf-opsec-v6 from the IoT Directorate perspective.  
I am a volunteer on the IoT, and do not speak authoritatively for the IoT
Directorate as a whole.  My impression of this document is that it's useful,
but could use some work.   Some of my comments below are coming strictly from
an IoT perspective; others are more general.

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The document doesn't talk about its intended audience.  It appears to be the
case based on my reading of it that the intended audience is enterprise
operators and similar.  This should be stated clearly and explicitly.  Some of
the advice in this document would be actively harmful if deployed on an
unmanaged network (e.g. in a home).  That doesn't mean that the document is
bad—just that it needs to be scoped appropriately.   I would suggest adding a
brief statement of applicability in the abstract and a more detailed
explanation in the introduction.  It is important that this statement make
clear that the advice in this document must not be followed by implementers of
home routers and similar devices.   E.g., this advice would utterly break a
Thread (IPv6 over 802.15.4 mesh) Border Router.

It's also not clear that this document lives up to its abstract.   The abstract
says:

   This document analyzes the operational security issues in several
   places of a network (enterprises, service providers and residential
   users) and proposes technical and procedural mitigations techniques.

And yet if you look for example at section 2.1.1, there is no actual analysis
of the use of ULAs, nor is any advice on their use provided.

Section 2.1.4 doesn't mention using DHCP to provide hosts with obfuscated
address that, since known to the operator, can be added to filter lists as
appropriate, while still making probing mathematically challenging to an
outside attacker.

Section 2.1.6 incorrectly implies that DHCPv4 binds IP addresses to link-layer
addresses.  This is not true.  I don't know that it really matters, but since
it's not true, you should fix it.  DHCPv4 uses a "client identifier," which is
quite similar to a DUID.  If no client identifier is offered, then the
link-layer address is used, but this is not required, and the behavior
described for DUIDs in this document is also applicable to client identifiers.

2.1.7 seems to be continuing a thought that was started in 2.1.4.  It would be
worth stating that explicitly, and comparing and contrasting these approaches.

Although the abstract explicitly excludes applicability to IoT networks, the
advice in this document will necessarily be taken as applicable in situations
where IoT networks are leaf networks or even infrastructure that is present
alongside the networks that _are_ covered by this document.  This has some
specific impacts that aren't talked about here and should be.   For instance,
Manufacturer Usage Descriptions (MUD) are not mentioned, and should be.   MUD
is applicable to infrastructure devices and really any special-purpose device;
e.g., MUD would be highly appropriate for use in hospital environments where
many devices are connected to the network that absolutely must have their
accessibility controlled; MUD is a good candidate for doing this.   The
omission of this approach from section 2,1 is a major gap, since the issues
discussed in section 2.1 directly impact the feasibility of using MUD (since
MUD specifies firewall behavior for devices, and devices are necessarily
identified by source address).

The conclusion I'm drawing having gotten to the end of section 2.1, in addition
to what I've said above, is that some of the issues introduced in subsections
of section 2.1, like filterability of host addresses, really belong in the
initial section 2.1 introduction, so that the subsections of 2.1 can refer back
and give the reader a coherent picture, rather than requiring the reader to
synthesize this as they read through the subsections.

Section 2.3.2 talks about the threat of a MITM attack through the use of forged
RAs, but doesn't actually describe how prevalent such on-link attacks are (this
would be an on-link attack) nor does it talk about how such an on-link attack
would be more effective than an attack the attacker could do without this
capability.  Without a threat model, this is somewhat hypothetical.

Section 2.3.2 goes on to talk at length about how to make RA Guard work,
without talking about when it is useful, what attacks it prevents, and what
problems it causes when deployed incorrectly.  We have actually run into
serious problems working on the Thread Border Router specification because of
uncertainty about whether RA Guard may be present on a network to which the TBR
is attached.  If it is, then the easiest way for the TBR to advertise
reachability is gone, and we have to resort to bypasses such as ND Proxy,
reverse NAT64, NAT66, or tunnels, just in order to ensure reachability of the
leaf network.

I think it's actively harmful to recommend the use of RA guard without talking
about the problems it causes and how to mitigate them.  This section should
explicitly say that RA guard should never be enabled by default: it should be
the case that the operator enables it explicitly, and that in cases where there
is no operator with the authority to set routing policy for a link, RA guard
should not be used on that link.

SAVI is another extremely useful technology that can't really be deployed
automatically without creating similar problems.  To be clear, my goal here is
not to say that the document shouldn't recommend RA guard or SAVI, but rather
that it should be very clear about when to deploy it and when not to.

In section 2.3.5, what is a "generic operating system?"   I don't know what
this term means.   Can you use a term with a clearer meaning?

One thing I didn't see discussed in section 2 that I think belongs there is the
concept of isolation of networks.  Networks that provide connectivity to
general-purpose devices like phones and comouters may need to provide
flexibility of addressing for privacy reasons.  Infrastructure devices,
particularly those for which MUD is applicable, may need to be on networks
where filtering is present and addressing is tightly controlled.  There's no
discussion fo this kind of separation in the document, and I think it's a
serious gap.