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Geneve Protocol Security Requirements
draft-mglt-nvo3-geneve-security-requirements-01

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This is an older version of an Internet-Draft whose latest revision state is "Expired".
Authors Daniel Migault , Sami Boutros , Dan Wing , Suresh Krishnan
Last updated 2017-10-24
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draft-mglt-nvo3-geneve-security-requirements-01
NVO3                                                          D. Migault
Internet-Draft                                                  Ericsson
Intended status: Informational                                S. Boutros
Expires: April 27, 2018                                          D. Wing
                                                                  VMware
                                                             S. Krishnan
                                                                  Kaloom
                                                        October 24, 2017

                 Geneve Protocol Security Requirements
            draft-mglt-nvo3-geneve-security-requirements-01

Abstract

   The document defines the security requirements to protect tenants
   overlay traffic against security threats from the NVO3 network
   components that are interconnected with tunnels implemented using
   Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation (Geneve).

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on April 27, 2018.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must

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   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Requirements Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   3.  Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   4.  Security Threats  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     4.1.  Passive Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     4.2.  Active Attacks  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
   5.  Requirements for Security Mitigations . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     5.1.  Protection Against Traffic Sniffing . . . . . . . . . . .   7
     5.2.  Protecting Against Traffic Injection  . . . . . . . . . .   7
     5.3.  Protecting Against Traffic Redirection  . . . . . . . . .   9
     5.4.  Protecting Against Traffic Replay . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
   6.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   7.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   8.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     8.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
     8.2.  Informational References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11

1.  Requirements Notation

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
   "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described BCP 14
   [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals,
   as shown here.

2.  Introduction

   The network virtualization overlay over Layer 3 (NVO3) as depicted in
   Figure 1, allows an overlay cloud provider to provide a logical L2/L3
   interconnect for the Tenant Systems TSes that belong to a specific
   tenant network.  A packet received from a TS is encapsulated by the
   ingress Network Virtualization Edge (NVE).  The encapsulated packet
   is then sent to the remote NVE through a tunnel.  When reaching the
   egress NVE of the tunnel, the packet is decapsulated and forwarded to
   the target TS.  The L2/L3 address mappings to the remote NVE(s) are
   distributed to the NVEs by a logically centralized Network
   Virtualization Authority (NVA) or using a distributed control plane
   such as Ethernet-VPN.  In a datacenter, the NVO3 tunnels can be
   implemented using Generic Network Virtualization Encapsulation
   (Geneve) [I-D.ietf-nvo3-geneve].  Such Geneve tunnels establish NVE-
   to-NVE communications, may transit within the data center via Geneve

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   Transit Nodes (GTN).  The Geneve tunnels overlay network enable
   multiple Virtual Networks to coexist over a shared underlay
   infrastructure, and a Virtual Network may span a single data center
   or multiple data centers.

   The underlay infrastructure on which the multi-tenancy overlay
   networks are hosted, can be owned and provided by an underlay
   provider who may be different from the overlay cloud provider.

         +--------+                                    +--------+
         | Tenant +--+                            +----| Tenant |
         | System |  |                           (')   | System |
         +--------+  |    .................     (   )  +--------+
                     |  +---+           +---+    (_)
                     +--|NVE|---+   +---|NVE|-----+
                        +---+   |   |   +---+
                        / .    +-----+      .
                       /  . +--| NVA |      .
                      /   . |  +-----+      .
                     |    . |               .
                     |    . |  L3 Overlay +--+--++--------+
         +--------+  |    . |   Network   | NVE || Tenant |
         | Tenant +--+    . |             |     || System |
         | System |       .  \ +---+      +--+--++--------+
         +--------+       .....|NVE|.........
                               +---+
                                 |
                                 |
                       =====================
                         |               |
                     +--------+      +--------+
                     | Tenant |      | Tenant |
                     | System |      | System |
                     +--------+      +--------+

   Figure 1: Generic Reference Model for Network Virtualization Overlays
                                 [RFC7365]

   This document discusses the security risks that a Geneve based NVO3
   network may encounter and tries to provide a list of essential
   security requirements that needs to be fulfilled.  In addition, this
   document lists the requirements to protect the Geneve packet
   components defined in [I-D.ietf-nvo3-geneve] that include the Geneve
   tunnel IP and UDP header, the Geneve Header, Geneve options, and
   inner payload.  Protecting the complete Geneve packet - that is the
   full IP packet or the full outer UDP payload for example - is out of
   scope of this document, given that this can be supported using
   existing mechanisms.

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   This document assumes that a tenant subscribes to an overlay cloud
   provider for hosting its Tenant Systems, the cloud provider manages
   the Geneve overlay network on behalf of the tenant.  The overlay
   network will be hosted on an underlay network infrastructure, that
   may be managed by another underlay cloud provider.

   The security requirements in this document aims at providing the
   overlay cloud provider the necessary options to ensure:

   1.  Delivering tenant payload traffic and ensuring privacy and
       integrity of the overlay traffic, and isolation between the
       overlay and underlay networks, as well preventing tenant traffic
       from being redirected or injected to other tenants.

   2.  Protecting tenant traffic from rogue devices in the providers of
       Geneve overlay or underlay networks.

   In summary, the document defines the security requirements to protect
   tenants overlay traffic against security threats from the NVO3
   network components that are interconnected with tunnels implemented
   using Geneve.  As well, the document strongly recommend to re-use
   existing security protocols like IP Security (IPsec) [RFC4301] and
   Transport Layer Security (TLS) [RFC5246], and existing encryption
   algorithms, and authentication protocols.

   Authentication requirements for NVO3 devices, automated key
   management, as well as packet level security providing
   confidentiality, integrity and authorization requirements defined in
   [I-D.ietf-nvo3-security-requirements] are also requirements for this
   document.

3.  Terminology

   This document uses the terminology of [RFC8014], [RFC7365] and
   [I-D.ietf-nvo3-geneve]

4.  Security Threats

   Attacks from compromised NVO3 and underlay network devices, and
   attacks from compromised tenant systems defined in
   [I-D.ietf-nvo3-security-requirements] are considered for the Geneve
   overlay network.  Furthermore, the attackers knowing the details of
   the Geneve packets can perform their attacks by changing fields in
   the Geneve tunnel header, base header, Geneve options and Geneve
   packet inner payload.

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   Threats include traffic analysis, sniffing, injection, redirection,
   and replay.  Based on these threats, this document enumerates the
   security requirements.

   Threats are divided into two categories: passive attack and active
   attack.

4.1.  Passive Attacks

   Passive attacks include traffic analysis (noticing which workloads
   are communicating with which other workloads, how much traffic, and
   when those communications occur) and sniffing (examining traffic for
   useful information such as personally-identifyable information or
   protocol information (e.g., TLS certificate, overlay routing
   protocols).

   A rogue element of the overlay Geneve network under the control of an
   attacker may leak and redirect the traffic from a virtual network to
   the attacker for passive monitoring [RFC7258].

   Avoiding leaking information is hard to enforced and the security
   requirements expect to mitigate such attacks by lowering the
   consequences, typically making leaked data unusable to an attacker..

4.2.  Active Attacks

   Active attacks involve modifying packets, injecting packets, or
   interfering with packet delivery (such as by corrupting packet
   checksum).

   There are multiple motivations to inject illegitimate traffic into a
   tenants network.  When the rogue element is on the path of the TS
   traffic, it may be able to inject and receive the corresponding
   messages back.  On the other hand, if the attacker is not on the path
   of the TS traffic it may be limited to only inject traffic to a TS
   without receiving any response back.  When rogue element have access
   to the traffic in both directions, the possibilities are only limited
   by the capabilities of the other on path elements - GTN, NVE or TS -
   to detect and protect against the illegitimate traffic.  On the other
   hand, when the rogue element is not on path, the surface for such
   attacks remains still quite large.  For example, an attacker may
   target a specific TS or application by crafting a specific packet
   that can either generate load on the system or crash the system or
   application.  TCP syn flood typically overload the TS while not
   requiring the ability to receive responses.  Note that udp
   application are privileged target as they do not require the
   establishment of a session and are expected to treat any incoming
   packets.

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   Traffic injection may also be used to flood the virtual network to
   disrupt the communications between the TS or to introduce additional
   cost for the tenant, for example when pricing considers the traffic
   inside the virtual network.  The two latest attacks may also take
   advantage of applications with a large factor of amplification for
   their responses as well as applications that upon receiving a packet
   interact with multiple TS.  Similarly, applications running on top of
   UDP are privileged targets.

   Note also that an attacker that is not able to receive the response
   traffic, may use other channels to evaluate or measure the impact of
   the attack.  Typically, in the case of a service, the attacker may
   have access, for example, to a user interface that provides
   indication on the level of disruption and the success of an attack,
   Such feed backs may also be used by the attacker to discover or scan
   the network.

   Preventing traffic to cross virtual networks, reduce the surface of
   attack, but rogue element main still perform attacks within a given
   virtual network by replaying a legitimate packet.  Some variant of
   such attack also includes modification of unprotected parts when
   available in order for example to increase the payload size.

5.  Requirements for Security Mitigations

   The document assumes that Security protocols, algorithms, and
   implementations provide the security properties for which they are
   designed, an attack caused by a weakness in a cryptographic algorithm
   is out of scope.

   Protecting network connecting TSes and NVEs which could be accessible
   to outside attackers is out of scope.

   An attacker controlling an underlying network device may break the
   communication of the overlays by discarding or delaying the delivery
   of the packets passing through it.  The security consideration to
   prevent this type of attack is out of scope of this document.

   Securing communication between NVAs and NVEs is out of scope.

   Selectively providing integrity/authentication, confidentiality/
   encryption of only portions of the Geneve packet is in scope.  This
   will be the case if the Tenant Systems uses security protocol to
   protect its communications.

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5.1.  Protection Against Traffic Sniffing

   A passive network observer can determine two virtual machines are
   communicating by manipulating activity or network activity of other
   virtual machines on that same host.  For example, the attacker could
   control (or be otherwise aware of) network activity of the other VMs
   running on the same host, and deduce other network activity is due to
   a victim VM.  Comparing application TLS to guest IPsec ESP to NVE
   IPsec ESP, each provides stronger protection from traffic analysis in
   the same order.  Application TLS exposes TCP port numbers to a
   passive observer, guest IPsec ESP encrypts the inner transport header
   but still identifies the communicating VM's IP address, while NVE
   IPsec ESP encrypts the entire inner payload.

   To protect packet payloads from passive listeners, application-level
   encryption (e.g., JSON Web Encryption [RFC7516]), application TLS,
   guest IPsec ESP, or hypervisor IPsec ESP can be used.  Each provides
   the same protection against a passive listener.

   To protect against the above-described traffic sniffing attacks, we
   require:

   REQ1:  The NVE MUST ensure the traffic leaving the NVE has its
          payload encrypted.

   REQ2:  To provide best protection from traffic analysis, the NVE
          SHOULD encrypt the VM's inner IP address, transport header,
          and payload.

5.2.  Protecting Against Traffic Injection

   Traffic injection from a rogue non legitimate NVO3 Geneve overlay
   device or a rogue underlay transit device can target an NVE, a
   transit underlay device or a Tenant System.  Targeting a Tenant's
   System requires a valid MAC and IP addresses of the Tenant's System.

   Tenant's System may protect their communications using IPsec or TLS.
   Such protection protects the Tenants from receiving spoofed packets,
   as any injected packet is expected to be discarded by the destination
   Tenant's System.  Such protection does not protect the tenant system
   from receiving illegitimate packets that may disrupt the Tenant's
   System performance.

   The Geneve overlay network MAY still need to prevent such spoofed
   Tenant's system packets from being steered to the Tenant's system.

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   When the Tenant's System are not protecting their communications, the
   Geneve overlay network SHOULD be able to to prevent a rogue device
   from injecting traffic into the overlay network.

   In order to prevent traffic injection to one virtual network, the
   destination legitimate Geneve NVE MUST be able to authenticate the
   incoming Geneve packets from the source NVE.  Authenticated Geneve
   Packet MAY be checked by underlay intermediary nodes.

   Based on a policy partial authentication MAY be performed on Geneve
   packets if tenant's system is protecting it's communication.

   This leads to the following security requirements:

   REQ3:  A Geneve NVE MUST be able to authenticate the Geneve tunnel
          Header, and/or the Geneve base header, and/or the immutable
          Geneve Options, and/or the Geneve payload.

   REQ4:  A Geneve NVE MAY be able to authenticate only a portion of the
          Geneve payload if the Tenant's system is protecting its
          communication.

   REQ5:  A GTN MAY be able to validate the authentication before the
          packet reaches the Geneve destination NVE.

   REQ6:  A GTN MUST be able to insert an authenticated Geneve Option
          into a authenticated Geneve Packet - protected by the source
          Geneve NVE.

   REQ7:  A GTN MUST be capable of forwarding the Geneve authenticated
          packet as an non-authenticated Geneve Packet.

   REQ8:  A Geneve NVE SHOULD be able to set different security policies
          for different flows.  These flows MUST be identified from the
          Geneve Header and/or Geneve Options as well as some inner
          traffic selectors.

   REQ9:  In the case when Tenant systems secure their communications
          using protocols such as TLS or IPsec.  A Geneve NVE MAY be
          able to selectively encrypt and/or authenticate only the
          sections that are not encrypted/authenticated by the Tenant
          System.  For example, only the IP, transport (TCP / UDP) in
          case of TLS/DTLS MAY be encrypted/authenticated, while only
          the IP header and ESP header MAY be encrypted/authenticated.

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5.3.  Protecting Against Traffic Redirection

   A rogue device of the NVO3 overlay Geneve network or the underlay
   network may redirect the traffic from a virtual network to the
   attacker for passive or active attacks.

   To prevent an attacker located in the middle between the NVEs and
   modifying the tunnel address information in the data packet header to
   redirect the data traffic, the solution need to provide
   confidentiality protection for data traffics exchanged between NVEs.

   Based on a policy partial encryption MAY be performed on Geneve
   packets if tenant's system is protecting it's communication.

   This leads to the following security requirements:

   REQ10: A Geneve NVE MUST be able encrypt Geneve base Header, and/or
          Geneve Payload and/or Geneve Options not intended for the GTN.

   REQ11: A Geneve NVE MAY be able encrypt portion of Geneve Payload as
          well as as Geneve Options not intended for the GTN.

   REQ12: A transit underlay intermediary node MUST be able to insert an
          encrypted Geneve Option into an encrypted/authenticated Geneve
          Packet - protected by the source Geneve NVE.

   REQ13: A Geneve NVE SHOULD be able to assign different cryptographic
          keys to protect the unicast tunnels between NVEs respectively.

   REQ14: If there are multicast packets, a Geneve NVE SHOULD be able to
          assign distinct cryptographic group keys to protect the
          multicast packets exchanged among the NVEs within different
          multicast groups.  Upon receiving a data packet, an egress
          Geneve NVE MUST be able to verify whether the packet is sent
          from a proper ingress NVE which is authorized to forward that
          packet.

5.4.  Protecting Against Traffic Replay

   A rogue device of the NVO3 overlay Geneve network or the underlay
   network may replay a Geneve packet, to load the network and/or a
   specific Tenant System with a modified Geneve payload.  In some
   cases, such attacks may target an increase of the tenants costs.

   When traffic between tenants is not protected, the rogue device may
   forward the modified packet over a valid Geneve Header.  The crafted
   packet may for example, include a specifically crafted application

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   payload for a specific Tenant Systems application, with the intention
   to load the tenant specific application.

   Updating the Geneve header and option parameters such as setting an
   OAM bit, adding bogus option TLVs, or setting a critical bit, may
   result in different processing behavior, that could greatly impact
   performance of the overlay network and the underlay infrastructure
   and thus affect the tenants traffic delivery.

   The NVO3 overlay network and underlay network nodes that may address
   such attacks MUST provide means to authenticate the Geneve packet
   components.

   This leads to the following security requirements:

   REQ15: A Geneve NVE or a GTN SHOULD be able to validate the Geneve
          Header corresponds to the Geneve payload, and discard such
          packets.

   REQ16: A Geneve NVE or a GTN SHOULD provide anti replay mechanisms
          and discard replayed packet.

6.  IANA Considerations

   There are no IANA consideration for this document.

7.  Security Considerations

   The whole document is about security.

   Limiting the coverage of the authentication / encryption provides
   some means for an attack to craft special packets.

8.  References

8.1.  Normative References

   [I-D.ietf-nvo3-geneve]
              Gross, J., Ganga, I., and T. Sridhar, "Geneve: Generic
              Network Virtualization Encapsulation", draft-ietf-
              nvo3-geneve-05 (work in progress), September 2017.

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.

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   [RFC4301]  Kent, S. and K. Seo, "Security Architecture for the
              Internet Protocol", RFC 4301, DOI 10.17487/RFC4301,
              December 2005, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4301>.

   [RFC5246]  Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
              (TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC5246, August 2008,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5246>.

   [RFC8174]  Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
              2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.

8.2.  Informational References

   [I-D.ietf-nvo3-security-requirements]
              Hartman, S., Zhang, D., Wasserman, M., Qiang, Z., and M.
              Zhang, "Security Requirements of NVO3", draft-ietf-nvo3-
              security-requirements-07 (work in progress), June 2016.

   [RFC7258]  Farrell, S. and H. Tschofenig, "Pervasive Monitoring Is an
              Attack", BCP 188, RFC 7258, DOI 10.17487/RFC7258, May
              2014, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7258>.

   [RFC7365]  Lasserre, M., Balus, F., Morin, T., Bitar, N., and Y.
              Rekhter, "Framework for Data Center (DC) Network
              Virtualization", RFC 7365, DOI 10.17487/RFC7365, October
              2014, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7365>.

   [RFC7516]  Jones, M. and J. Hildebrand, "JSON Web Encryption (JWE)",
              RFC 7516, DOI 10.17487/RFC7516, May 2015,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7516>.

   [RFC8014]  Black, D., Hudson, J., Kreeger, L., Lasserre, M., and T.
              Narten, "An Architecture for Data-Center Network
              Virtualization over Layer 3 (NVO3)", RFC 8014,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC8014, December 2016,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8014>.

Authors' Addresses

   Daniel Migault
   Ericsson
   8400 boulevard Decarie
   Montreal, QC  H4P 2N2
   Canada

   Email: daniel.migault@ericsson.com

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   Sami Boutros
   VMware, Inc.

   Email: sboutros@vmware.com

   Dan Wing
   VMware, Inc.

   Email: dwing@vmware.com

   Suresh Krishna
   Kaloom

   Email: suresh@kaloom.com

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