[secdir] secdir review of draft-ietf-pwe3-mpls-transport-04

Radia Perlman <Radia.Perlman@sun.com> Mon, 03 August 2009 14:52 UTC

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Date: Mon, 03 Aug 2009 07:53:07 -0700
From: Radia Perlman <Radia.Perlman@sun.com>
To: secdir@ietf.org, iesg@ietf.org, stbryant@cisco.com, mmorrow@cisco.com, swallow@cisco.com, tom.nadeau@bt.com
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Subject: [secdir] secdir review of draft-ietf-pwe3-mpls-transport-04
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This document describes how to make an MPLS-TP path one one party (party A)
appear to be an MPLS-TP link of another (party B), in other words, tunneling
party B's MPLS-TP information over party A's -provided path.

As noted in the security considerations section, there are no new security
issues raised by using this already-existing mechanism for this purpose.

One comment: Rao Cherukuri's email address seems to be missing
from "authors' addresses".

A couple of questions, really...it looks like the term "Transport" is used
in the MPLS/ITU context to mean more like layer 3, rather than end-to-end
layer 4 (like TCP). Although this always seemed a much more natural use
of the term "transport" (since layer 3 and layer 2 really do transport 
things
and layer 4 doesn't), why is it is called "TP" here?

And in the security considerations section it mentions the problem of
static configuration having the possibility of a forwarding loop. Again just
a comment -- admittedly a packet can go round the loop a few times before
the TTL expires, but given that there is a TTL, it seems like a looping MPLS
path might not be too bad. Especially if part of the static 
configuration would
be the TTL to initiate packets on, for a particular MPLS path.

But as for the document being reviewed -- no security issues.

Radia