Re: [Roll] WGLC for draft-thubert-6man-flow-label-for-rpl-03

Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com> Fri, 01 August 2014 19:58 UTC

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Date: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 07:58:39 +1200
From: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com>
Organization: University of Auckland
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To: Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org>
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Subject: Re: [Roll] WGLC for draft-thubert-6man-flow-label-for-rpl-03
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On 01/08/2014 23:23, Carsten Bormann wrote:
...
> The other story is that we are retracting RFC 6437 and turning the flow label into the “field you may trample on in your lower layers if you have a good reason”.  Cynically, one could say this is proper payback for designing this field without a compelling purpose and no protocol evolution story attached to it.  So the evolution just eats it.  Teachable moment.

RFC 6437 co-author hat on (but only speaking for myself, of course):

My opinion is that the draft doesn't retract RFC 6437. As I already said,
6437 attempts to recognise the reality that middleboxes can mess with the
flow label, and to set conditions for that messing such that remote systems
can still use it for load balancing. Since it's unprotected by checksum or
crypto, there is a strict limit to how much it can be trusted anyway. As
the RFC says:

   There is no way to verify whether a flow label has been modified en
   route or whether it belongs to a uniform distribution.  Therefore, no
   Internet-wide mechanism can depend mathematically on unmodified and
   uniformly distributed flow labels; they have a "best effort" quality.
   Implementers should be aware that the flow label is an unprotected
   field that could have been accidentally or intentionally changed en
   route (see Section 6).

It is true that the RFC also says

   A forwarding node
   MUST either leave a non-zero flow label value unchanged or change it
   only for compelling operational security reasons...

There is a case for arguing that flow-label-for-rpl should carry the
legend "Updates: 6437 (if approved)" because it adds another exception
to this sentence. There is also a case for arguing that flow-label-for-rpl
is a stateful mechanism, out of scope for RFC 6437 according to
Section 4 of that RFC.

Either way, I don't see a problem.

Regards

   Brian