[secdir] review of draft-ietf-isis-bfd-tlv-02

[Stephen Kent <[e-mail]>]

I 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 is a very brief (8-page) document that is generally well 
written. It defines a TLV (an acronym not defined in the document, 
but I'm guessing type-length-value) value for use in IS-IS, for 
bidirectional forwarding detection (BFD). The abstract says that this 
TLV is needed because, in some scenarios, IS-IS fails to detect a 
forwarding plane failure based on BFD as described in 
ietf-bfd-generic]. Section 2 of this (the reviewed) document 
describes a class of scenarios in which the BFD mechanism cited above 
would not work properly, thus motivating the proposal contained here. 
The simple solution proposed here is for a router to advertise its 
ability to perform BFD on an interface via its IS-IS IIH (an acronym 
not defined in the document), hence the need to define this TLV.  My 
biggest complaint with the document overall is that it uses several 
acronyms without first defining them, an easy problem to fix.

The Security Considerations section is just one paragraph, which 
states that the addition of this feature does not adversely affect 
the security mechanism (sic) of IS-IS. I'm not questioning this 
assertion, based on reading this document, but I think a couple of 
additional sentences are needed here, to justify the assertion.