[secdir] (no subject)

["Hilarie Orman" <[e-mail]>]

                     Security review of
         Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Experimentation
                draft-ietf-tsvwg-ecn-experimentation-05

Do not be alarmed.  I have reviewed this document as part of the
security directorate's ongoing effort to review all IETF documents
being processed by the IESG.  These comments were written primarily
for the benefit of the security area directors.  Document editors and
WG chairs should treat these comments just like any other last call
comments.

This document liberalizes the ways in which experiments can be
conducted on explicit congestion notification with TCP, RTP, and DCCP.
RFC 3168 imposes limits on what can be marked and what cannot, how the
endpoints should respond, and reserves codepoints for particular
experiments.  There are three areas of experimentation that this
document intends to enable by removing standards track limitations:
congestion response differences, congestion marking differences, TCP
control packets and retransmissions.

Other than the alarming statement:

   "... this memo places the
   responsibility for not breaking Internet congestion control on the
   experiments and the experimenters who propose them, as specified in
   Section 4.4."

there are no security considerations that occur to me.

I realize that people experiment with TCP modifications all the time,
and the ECN experiments can provide valuable engineering information.
Nonetheless, it seems that some higher standard of safety could be
in order for today's Internet.  But that is outside the scope of this
document.


Hilarie