Re: [tsvwg] Packet Loss Signaling for Encrypted Protocols: draft-ferrieuxhamchaoui-tsvwg-lossbits

["Lubashev, Igor" <[e-mail]>]

Thank you for your comments, Tom. I am pleased that you find intent of the proposal admirable -- this is a major purpose of this draft.

This draft is "informational", not "standards track". Its purpose it to recommend a technique that would be adopted for specific protocols in different protocol-specific drafts, possibly in protocol-specific WGs.

As for our experiment, the bits we used were the two most significant bits of TTL (IPv4) and HopLimit (IPv6). That was done mostly for expediency of the implementation and good interoperability on the network.

Many thanks,

- Igor

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Herbert [[e-mail]]
Received: Monday, 08 Jul 2019, 8:20PM
To: Lubashev, Igor [[e-mail]]
CC: [e-mail] [[e-mail]]; Isabelle Hamchaoui [[e-mail]]; Alexandre Ferrieux [[e-mail]]
Subject: Re: [tsvwg] Packet Loss Signaling for Encrypted Protocols: draft-ferrieuxhamchaoui-tsvwg-lossbits

On Mon, Jul 8, 2019 at 2:20 PM Lubashev, Igor <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> Alexandre, Isabelle, and I have just posted a draft on a protocol-independent method for endpoints to signal packet loss to the path, while maintaining end user privacy and resisting ossification.  This method can work for any protocol, but the primary focus is, of course, on protocols that encrypt their headers.
>
> We think this loss signaling scheme (just takes 2 bits somewhere that are set by the sender) is an appropriate solution for allowing networks to do their job at providing high QoS and ease of troubleshooting without compromising on encrypted protocol goals.

Igor,

While the intent of the proposal is admirable, I think both the draft
and this description gloss over a critical piece of a protocol, namely
what is the exact protocol that the sender uses to convey the
information and the receiver knows how to unambiguously interpret it.
That is, it's not enough to say that it "just takes 2 bits somewhere
that are set by the sender", in order to produce robust and
interoperable implementations we'll need to know _exactly_ where those
two bits live. In passing the draft mentioned "e.g. two most
significant its of the TTL field in IP (see [IP]) and IPv6 (see
[IPv6]) headers or reserved bits in a QUIC v1 header (see
[QUIC-TRANSPORT]).". I'm not sure which of those are intended to be
implemented and standardized (It's not clear to me that any protocol
solution for such signaling, other that IPv6 HBH headers, can be
robustly defined for such signaling).

>
> - Igor
>
> P.S.
>   We've implemented this proposal in some Akamai servers and have been using it to serve actual end-user traffic for a subset of Orange customers.  Orange has implemented passive observer that used this signal to detect and identify loss.  We will discuss and analyze the data we collected at maprg (while the signaling protocol details belong to tsvwg).

Right, so if you've implemented something already then where were the
bits put in the protocol headers?

Thanks,
Tom

>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> A new version of I-D, draft-ferrieuxhamchaoui-tsvwg-lossbits-00.txt
> has been successfully submitted by Igor Lubashev and posted to the
> IETF repository.
>
> Name:           draft-ferrieuxhamchaoui-tsvwg-lossbits
> Revision:       00
> Title:          Packet Loss Signaling for Encrypted Protocols
> Document date:  2019-07-08
> Group:          Individual Submission
> Pages:          9
> URL:            https://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ferrieuxhamchaoui-tsvwg-lossbits-00.txt
> Status:         https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ferrieuxhamchaoui-tsvwg-lossbits/
> Htmlized:       https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ferrieuxhamchaoui-tsvwg-lossbits-00
> Htmlized:       https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ferrieuxhamchaoui-tsvwg-lossbits
>
>
> Abstract:
>    This document describes a protocol-independent method that employs
>    two bits to allow endpoints to signal packet loss in a way that can
>    be used by network devices to measure and locate the source of the
>    loss.  The signaling method applies to all protocols with a protocol-
>    specific way to identify packet loss.  The method is especially
>    valuable when applied to protocols that encrypt transport header and
>    do not allow an alternative method for loss detection.
>