Re: [secdir] secdir review of draft-ietf-forces-protoextension-04

Jamal Hadi Salim <hadi@mojatatu.com> Tue, 05 August 2014 13:22 UTC

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From: Jamal Hadi Salim <hadi@mojatatu.com>
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 09:21:47 -0400
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To: Tobias Gondrom <tobias.gondrom@gondrom.org>
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Cc: draft-ietf-forces-protoextension.all@tools.ietf.org, The IESG <iesg@ietf.org>, secdir@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [secdir] secdir review of draft-ietf-forces-protoextension-04
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Thanks Tobias.
I will make the changes we discussed - wait for other reviews and amalgamate.
The AD should be able to decide if we need a revised publication.

cheers,
jamal

On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 9:11 AM, Tobias Gondrom
<tobias.gondrom@gondrom.org> wrote:
> Thanks for your response.
> Thank you. I think my concerns have been heard and leave it to you
> whether you want to amend text in some places or not.
> Best wishes, Tobias
>
>
> On 05/08/14 13:55, Jamal Hadi Salim wrote:
>> Hi Tobias,
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 7:13 AM, Tobias Gondrom
>> <tobias.gondrom@gondrom.org> wrote:
>>> Hi Jamal,
>>>
>>> thanks for the fast reply.
>>> And thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.
>>>
>>> Please see my answers only as my personal comments and I am no expert in
>>> the forces spec. So I might very well be wrong.
>>>
>> No worries, an extra pair of eyes with a different view always provides a
>> perspective we may have overlooked.
>>
>>>> Hrm. In a cluster of CEs where you have new + older CEs, yes - that is possible.
>>>> Caveat: The CEs are spec-ed to talk to each other on CE-CE plane. I would expect
>>>> what you described to be a "buggy" decision by the master CE.
>>>> Would text that describes this as a faulty setup be reasonable to add
>>>> to cover this?
>>> Yes. That might be a useful point.
>>> But please see my review questions only as personal comment. I would not
>>> want to make suggestions that go against the WG views.
>>>
>> Ok, will find a spot to discuss this.
>>
>>> Small add-on question:
>>> Not sure whether there are potentially two scenarios here:
>>> 1. the first as you described might be a "buggy" decision by a master CE
>>> to switching on the "only" new
>>> EXTENDEDRESULT-TLVs and by that switching off the old codes for the
>>> other old CEs.
>>> 2. wondering whether there might be a second scenario where a malicious
>>> person would intentionally try to insert one new CE and switch the FEs
>>> to EXTENDEDRESULT-TLVs to "blind" an existing "old" CE network to some
>>> of the error codes?
>>>
>> An arbitrary CE should not be able to join a cluster or win an election for
>> mastership without authentication and authorization.
>> i.e this is all covered by the trust issue i described earlier.
>> The FE has explicit trust with the CE. If that trust is compromised, security
>> breach is not limited to just this one issue.
>> The reason i described the other scenario as buggy is the CEs should be
>> able to coordinate amongst themselves if they have discrepancies
>> (although it is outside scope of ForCES to describe how that is achieved)
>>
>>> Yes. I understand.
>>> My concern is the following: AFAIK (and I might very well be wrong) so
>>> far the protocol mostly required many requests to receive the data from
>>> the FEs. Which is inefficient, but equally put symmetric compute
>>> resource requirements on both points (CE and FE). Aka, you would see a
>>> many requests to put a FE to work. With the new "TABLERANGE-TLV", it
>>> seems I can send one request which will trigger more computing activity
>>> on the FE.
>> Note that a single request to get many (possible) responses back already
>> exists *today*. Example, I can send one message to dump 10M table rows.
>> Nothing new there. ForCES says to restrict the transaction pipeline window size
>> (default of 1) so you cant send 10000 of those - and if you could,
>> then such requests
>> which will cause problems of starving other possible transactions because you
>> are hogging both bandwidth and cpu at the FE . It is likely a buggy
>> control application to do this. But these are *trusted* apps - they are just
>> bad code as opposed to malice and the transaction windowing should minimize
>> damage.
>> In our implementation (and specified in RFC 5811) we would lower the priority
>> of these dump responses in a work conserving way
>> if there are other high prio requests (like a SET for example).
>>
>> A simplistic approach to retrieve a table range would be to get all the 10M
>> table rows and then do the filtering to select 2000 rows in the controller.
>> This uses more bandwidth and possibly more CPU on the FE (slave) since it
>> has to dump *all* rows.
>> What you describe as "more computing activity" boils down  to running the filter
>> i described above at the FE device instead of the controller.
>> In my experience this hasnt been an issue - but i am willing to be cautious.
>>
>>> So yes, you are right with your analogy between brain and
>>> legs and the trust relationship to the controller. However, before, your
>>> "brain" could send one command at a time to the legs, now it could send
>>> a whole marching program to the legs with one single request. And send
>>> multiple such requests in succession. Could that pose risks for denial
>>> of service (accidental or malicious) that might not have been
>>> anticipated in RFC5810?
>>>
>> Not any more than they do today. i.e Malice is solved by the general security
>> infrastructure; if a CE can get into the cluster, be authenticated and vetted as
>> legit, wins an election and starts telling the FE what to do, then we have
>> a bigger problem.
>> OTOH, bugs may exist and we gotta protect against those.
>>
>> Thanks again for taking the time.
>>
>> cheers,
>> jamal
>