Considerations around Transport Header Confidentiality, Network Operations, and the Evolution of Internet Transport Protocols
draft-ietf-tsvwg-transport-encrypt-17
TSVWG G. Fairhurst
Internet-Draft University of Aberdeen
Intended status: Informational C. Perkins
Expires: March 12, 2021 University of Glasgow
September 08, 2020
Considerations around Transport Header Confidentiality, Network
Operations, and the Evolution of Internet Transport Protocols
draft-ietf-tsvwg-transport-encrypt-17
Abstract
To protect user data and privacy, Internet transport protocols have
supported payload encryption and authentication for some time. Such
encryption and authentication is now also starting to be applied to
the transport protocol headers. This helps avoid transport protocol
ossification by middleboxes, while also protecting metadata about the
communication. Current operational practice in some networks inspect
transport header information within the network, but this is no
longer possible when those transport headers are encrypted.
This document discusses the possible impact when network traffic uses
a protocol with an encrypted transport header. It suggests issues to
consider when designing new transport protocols or features. These
considerations arise from concerns such as network operations,
prevention of network ossification, enabling transport protocol
evolution and respect for user privacy.
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 March 12, 2021.
Fairhurst & Perkins Expires March 12, 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft Transport Header Encryption September 2020
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2020 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
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. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Context and Rationale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1. Use of Transport Header Information in the Network . . . 6
2.2. Authentication of Transport Header Information . . . . . 8
2.3. Perspectives on Observable Transport Header Fields . . . 8
3. Current uses of Transport Headers within the Network . . . . 12
3.1. To Identify Transport Protocols and Flows . . . . . . . . 13
3.2. To Understand Transport Protocol Performance . . . . . . 14
3.3. To Support Network Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3.4. To Support Network Diagnostics and Troubleshooting . . . 24
3.5. To Support Header Compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
4. Encryption and Authentication of Transport Headers . . . . . 26
4.1. Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
4.2. Approaches to Transport Header Protection . . . . . . . . 27
5. Addition of Transport OAM Information to Network-Layer
Headers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
5.1. Use of OAM within a Maintenance Domain . . . . . . . . . 29
5.2. Use of OAM across Multiple Maintenance Domains . . . . . 29
6. Intentionally Exposing Transport Information to the Network . 30
6.1. Exposing Transport Information in Extension Headers . . . 30
6.2. Common Exposed Transport Information . . . . . . . . . . 31
6.3. Considerations for Exposing Transport Information . . . . 31
7. Implications of Protecting the Transport Headers . . . . . . 31
7.1. Independent Measurement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
7.2. Characterising "Unknown" Network Traffic . . . . . . . . 34
7.3. Accountability and Internet Transport Protocols . . . . . 34
Show full document text