[tcpm] WG Action: RECHARTER: TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions (tcpm)

[IESG Secretary <[e-mail]>]

The charter of the TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions (tcpm) 
working group in the Transport Area of the IETF has been updated.  
For additional information, please contact the Area Directors or the 
working group Chairs.

+++

TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions (tcpm)
============================================

Current Status: Active Working Group

Chair(s):
Ted Faber <[e-mail]>
Mark Allman <[e-mail]>

Transport Area Director(s):
Magnus Westerlund <[e-mail]> 
Lars Eggert <[e-mail]>

Transport Area Advisor:
Lars Eggert <[e-mail]>

Mailing Lists:
General Discussion: [e-mail]
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Description of Working Group:

TCP is currently the Internet's predominant transport protocol.
To maintain TCP's utility the IETF has regularly updated both the protocol
itself and the congestion control algorithms implemented by the protocol that
are crucial for the stability of the Internet.  These changes reflect our
evolving understanding of transport protocols, congestion control and new
needs presented by an ever-changing network.  The TCPM WG will provide a venue
within the IETF to work on these issues.  The WG will serve several purposes:

* The WG will mostly focus on maintenance issues (e.g., bug
   fixes) and modest changes to the protocol and algorithms
   that maintain TCP's utility.

* The WG will be a venue for moving current TCP specifications
   along the standards track (as community energy is available
   for such efforts).

* The WG will write a document that outlines "what is TCP".
   This document will be a roadmap of sorts to the various TCP
   specifications in the RFC series.

TCPM will take a subset of the work which has been conducted in the Transport
Area WG over the past several years.
Specifically, some of the WG's initial work will be moved from the Transport
Area WG (tsvwg).

TCPM is expected to be the working group within the IETF to handle TCP
changes.  Proposals for additional TCP work items should be brought up within
the working group.  While fundamental changes to TCP or its congestion control
algorithms (e.g., departure from loss-based congestion control) should be
brought through TCPM, it is expected that such large changes will ultimately
be handled by the Transport Area WG (tsvwg).
All additional work items for TCPM will, naturally, require the approval of
the Transport Services Area Area Directors and the IESG.

TCP's congestion control algorithms are the model followed by alternate
transports (e.g., SCTP and (in some cases) DCCP).  In addition, the IETF has
recently worked on several documents about algorithms that are specified for
multiple protocols (e.g., TCP and SCTP) in the same document.  Which WG
shepherds such documents in the future will determined on a case-by-case
basis.  In any case, the TCPM WG will remain in close contact with other
relevant WGs working on these protocols to ensure openness and stringent
review from all angles.


Specific Goals:

* A document specifying a way to share the local "User TimeOut"
   value with the peer such that TCP connections can withstand long
   periods of disconnection.

* The WG is coming to grips with how to deal with spoofed segments
   that can tear down connections, cause data corruption or
   performance problems.  To this end the WG is generating an
   overview document as well as a scheme that mitigates some of the
   issues brought on by spoofed TCP segments using a
   challenge-response scheme to reduce the probabilities of a
   connection being impacted.  Finally, the WG will produce a
   document outlining the potential impact of using ICMP messages
   to attack TCP streams.

* The WG is writing an informational document about the ways in
   which TCPs can handle ICMP "soft errors".

* The WG is updating the specification for Explicit Congestion
   Notification to allow for the use of ECN during part of TCP's
   three-way handshake to aid performance for short transfers.

* The WG is writing an informational document that discusses
   commonly used, but not documented ways to combat SYN flooding
   attacks.

* The WG is updating RFC 2581 to fix some minor specification
   problems and move it along the standards track.


Goals and Milestones:

Done	  	Submit FRTO draft to IESG for publication as an Experimental
RFC
Done  		Submit TCP Roadmap document to IESG for publication as a Best  
Current Practices RFC
Done  		Submit NCR Reordering Mitigation draft to the IESG for  
publication as an Experimental RFC

Sep 06		Submit overview of spoofing attacks against TCP to IESG for  
publication as an Informational RFC.
Oct 06		Submit revision of RFC 2581 to the IESG for publication as a  
Draft Standard.
Oct 06		Submit In-Window Attack draft to IESG for publication as a  
Proposed Standard RFC.
Nov 06		Submit User TimeOut option document to the IESG for  
publication as a Proposed Standard RFC.
Nov 06		Submit ECN-SYN document to the IESG for publication as a  
Proposed Standard RFC.
Jan 07		Submit soft errors document to the IESG for publication as an  
Informational RFC.
Jan 07		Submit ICMP attack document to the IESG for publication as an  
Informational RFC.
Jan 07		Submit SYN flooding document to the IESG for publication as  
an Informational RFC.

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