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

Tobias Gondrom <tobias.gondrom@gondrom.org> Tue, 05 August 2014 13:11 UTC

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Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 14:11:23 +0100
From: Tobias Gondrom <tobias.gondrom@gondrom.org>
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Subject: Re: [secdir] secdir review of draft-ietf-forces-protoextension-04
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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