Re: [tram] FW: New Version Notification for draft-reddy-tram-turn-third-party-authz-00.txt

[Oleg Moskalenko <[e-mail]>]

Hi Tiru

please see below as [Oleg]:



On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 3:10 AM, Tirumaleswar Reddy (tireddy) <
[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi Oleg,
>
> Thanks for the review. Please see inline [TR]
>
> From: Oleg Moskalenko [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Sunday, February 16, 2014 10:31 AM
> To: Tirumaleswar Reddy (tireddy)
> Cc: [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: [tram] FW: New Version Notification for
> draft-reddy-tram-turn-third-party-authz-00.txt
>
> Hi Tiru
> I have some comments:
> 1) Section 4. Obtaining a Token Using OAuth, figure 4
>
> I believe that the sequence of messages is incorrect. The TURN server most
> probably will contact the Authorization server AFTER it gets the Allocate
> request. But on the figure 4, it looks like it somehow can predict the
> incoming request. The correct sequence must be, in the general case:
>    Access Token Request (1) from client to Auth server
>    Access Token + Session Key (2) from Auth server to client
>    Allocate request from client to TURN server (3)
>    Get Token from TURN Server to Auth server (4)
>    Token metadata from Auth Server to TURN server (5)
>    Allocate response from TURN server to the client (6)
>
> [TR] Good catch, fixed it. It got messed when we were changing from
> self-contained to handle token.
>
> The sequence shown on the figure 4 is possible only is the Auth Server and
> TURN server are somehow closely integrated and that is unnecessary.
>
> [TR] Yes, the AS and TURN server have to be integrated. There may be ways
> to standardize this, but this is not in the scope of this doc right away.
>

[Oleg]: I am afraid that if we require that AS and TURN to be provided by
the same company, it may affect the adoption of this approach.


>
> 2) The document is saying that the client when communicating to the Auth
> Server uses HTTP requests with JSON (REST API ?). May be it would be
> helpful if the communication protocol between TURN server and Auth server
> would be mentioned, too.
>
> [TR] Drafts in OAuth WG like
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-richer-oauth-introspection-04 discuss
> the communication mechanism b/w Resource Server and Authorization server.
>  You may also want to look into
> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/oauth/current/msg08607.html which
> discusses such communication mechanism already implemented but for a
> different purpose. I guess it all worked because Resource server and
> Authorization server are developed by the same company but with this use
> case we may have to discuss if standardization is required for the
> communication mechanism.
>

[Oleg]: As I said, if the AS and TURN in practice will have to be provided
by the same company, then that may be a problem - it will affect the
standard adoption by the WebRTC community. I'll have to explore the current
situation with the open-source OAuth servers - whether they provide a
viable "introspection" protocol. I hope some protocol recommendations can
be provided for third-party AS communications.


>
> 3) Section 7.2:
>
>    OAuth does not impose any limitation on the length of the access token
> but since
>    STUN messages cannot exceed 548 bytes (Section 7.1 of [RFC5389]),
>    access token length needs to be restricted to fit within the maximum
>    STUN message size.
>
> I am not sure that the STUN (Binding ?) max message size is relevant here
> and worth mentioning at all - because this doc is about TURN, and the TURN
> messages are often much larger than 548 bytes (especially when carrying the
> video traffic). So I see no relevance of the 548 limit to the new
> authentication standard. And that limitation of 548 bytes is applicable
> only to the cases when we suspect that the path MTU is really really low
> and that is an extremely rare case.
>
> [TR] Good point. But RFC 5766 recommends to restrict the size (Section 2.7
> Avoiding Fragmentation)
>
> <snip>
>
>    As a guideline, sending a maximum of 500 bytes of application data in
>    a single TURN message (by the client on the client-to-server leg) or
>    a UDP datagram (by the peer on the peer-to-server leg) will generally
>    avoid IP fragmentation.
>
> </snip>
>

[Oleg]: We recently had a discussion about that in WebRTC forum, with
Justin. He is saying that the WebRTC client tools (Chrome) assume the
minimum practical MTU as 1280 and that limit is used for media traffic. And
he is right that this MTU is a real modern practical limit.


>
>
> 4) Are we sure that we want to limit the OAuth applicability only to the
> long-term credentials mechanism ? I see no technical or philosophical
> reasons why not to use it for short-term credentials mechanism, too. It
> would be a more "symmetric" approach.
>
> [TR] what is the use case for short-term credential mechanism with TURN ?
>

[Oleg]: Currently WebRTC uses only the long-term credentials mechanism but
still there is a TURN standard for the short-term mechanism. While I cannot
provide any concrete example, I suppose there are some. And I believe that
OAuth is orthogonal to the TURN auth mechanism used - they can be combined
either way. So I see that coupling OAuth with the long-term mechanism is
rather artificial.


>
> 5) I'd put more definite wording how TURN server handles the token
> lifetime. What happens in the middle of the TURN session, is the auth token
> expires while the session is still active ? There may be two possible cases:
>    - the token lifetime is applicable only to the session initiation
> procedure. When the TURN session has been already established, it can go
> indefinitely while the client is refreshing the session properly.
>    - in second case when the token expires, the server rejects new
> requests from the client (in the same TURN session) until the client sends
> the new token data in re-authentication exchange.
>
> I'd suggest the first case as an eisier case for the implementation.
>
> [TR] The client MUST obtain a new token after the previously used one
> expires. As you point out an already established TURN session can continue,
> the new token is applicable for new requests.


[Oleg]: Tiru, I'd still like to hear a more definite language: what about
"new requests" within the existing session ? They are allowed to use the
old token - right ? When you are saying "new requests" you mean "new
session allocation requests", right ?

Regards,
Oleg