Re: WGLC for draft-ietf-bfd-unaffiliated-echo (ending 7 April, 2023)

[Greg Mirsky <[e-mail]>]

Dear Authors,
I read the latest version of the draft. I appreciate your work on improving
its readability. I have several concerns and appreciate your consideration:

   - It appears like the document defines the format of the Echo message.
   As I understand the RFC 5880, the format of the Echo message is not
   specified in the RFC 5880. It seems like by defining the format in this
   document, you affect RFC 5880 compliance of implementations that do support
   RFC 5880 as it exists today.
   - The draft, in my opinion, significantly changes the architecture of
   the BFD, as it is defined in RFC 5880. I believe that characterizing Echo
   as a function stresses its dependency from a BFD mode, Asynchronous and
   Demand. The changes proposed in this draft are very extensive and severely
   affect the existing architecture of BFD by setting the Echo function on
   par, unrelated with the BFD modes.
   - Also, I think that the normative language in the last paragraph of the
   Secrity Considerations sections are too soft. Currently used recommendation
   level, in my opinion, is insufficient and should be brought to the
   requirement level. I.e., I propose s/RECOMMENDED/MUST/ and s/SHOULD
   NOT/SHALL NOT/

In conclusion, I am very much concerned with the amount of changes to the
BFD architecture proposed in the document. I am also concerned with the
affect on the protocol conformance standing of the established BFD
implementations, SH BFD in particular. Hence, I propose changing this draft
to the Experimental track.

Regards,
Greg

On Tue, Mar 21, 2023 at 11:02 AM Jeffrey Haas <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Working Group,
>
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-bfd-unaffiliated-echo/05/
>
> The authors of draft-ietf-bfd-unaffiliated-echo have requested WGLC.
>
> The draft, in my opinion, is in fairly good shape.  However, since it
> functions via looping packets back to itself and trying to exercise the
> normal RFC 5880 state machine behaviors to a large extent, the draft could
> use very high scrutiny for several matters:
>
> - Does the state machine behave appropriately at all stages?
> - Are the descriptions of the values of the BFD fields clear in all cases?
>
> Please supply the authors and the Working Group with your feedback.
>
> The intended finish date for this WGLC is 7 April, 2023.  This is one week
> after the end of IETF 116.
>
> Note that Reshad is an author on the draft, so I'll be handling the full
> set
> of review and shepherding work.
>
> -- Jeff
>
>