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Close encounters of the ICMP type 2 kind (near misses with ICMPv6 PTB)
draft-ietf-v6ops-pmtud-ecmp-problem-04

The information below is for an old version of the document.
Document Type
This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 7690.
Authors Matt Byerly , Matt Hite , Joel Jaeggli
Last updated 2015-10-15 (Latest revision 2015-08-29)
RFC stream Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
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Stream WG state Submitted to IESG for Publication
Document shepherd Fred Baker
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Responsible AD Benoît Claise
Send notices to draft-ietf-v6ops-pmtud-ecmp-problem.all@ietf.org
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draft-ietf-v6ops-pmtud-ecmp-problem-04
v6ops                                                          M. Byerly
Internet-Draft                                                    Fastly
Intended status: Informational                                   M. Hite
Expires: March 1, 2016                                          Evernote
                                                              J. Jaeggli
                                                                  Fastly
                                                         August 29, 2015

 Close encounters of the ICMP type 2 kind (near misses with ICMPv6 PTB)
                 draft-ietf-v6ops-pmtud-ecmp-problem-04

Abstract

   This document calls attention to the problem of delivering ICMPv6
   type 2 "Packet Too Big" (PTB) messages to the intended destination
   (typically the server) in ECMP load balanced or anycast network
   architectures.  It discusses operational mitigations that can be
   employed to address this class of failures.

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 http://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 1, 2016.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2015 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
   (http://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.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   3.  Mitigation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.1.  Alternative Mitigations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     3.2.  Implementation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
       3.2.1.  Alternative Implementation  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   4.  Improvements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   5.  Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   6.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   7.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   8.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8

1.  Introduction

   Operators of popular Internet services face complex challenges
   associated with scaling their infrastructure.  One scaling approach
   is to utilize equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) routing to perform
   stateless distribution of incoming TCP or UDP sessions to multiple
   servers or to middle boxes such as load balancers.  Distribution of
   traffic in this manner presents a problem when dealing with ICMP
   signaling.  Specifically, an ICMP error is not guaranteed to hash via
   ECMP to the same destination as its corresponding TCP or UDP session.
   A case where this is particularly problematic operationally is path
   MTU discovery (PMTUD).

2.  Problem

   A common application for stateless load balancing of TCP or UDP flows
   is to perform an initial subdivision of flows in front of a stateful
   load balancer tier or multiple servers so that the workload becomes
   divided into manageable fractions of the total number of flows.  The
   flow division is performed using ECMP forwarding and a stateless but
   sticky algorithm for hashing across the available paths.  This
   nexthop selection for the purposes of flow distribution is a
   constrained form of anycast topology, where all anycast destinations
   are equidistant from the upstream router responsible for making the
   last next-hop forwarding decision before the flow arrives on the
   destination device.  In this approach, the hash is performed across
   some set of available protocol headers.  Typically, these headers may
   include all or a subset of (IPv6) Flow-Label, IP-source, IP-

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   destination, protocol, source-port, destination-port and potentially
   others such as ingress interface.

   A problem common to this approach of distribution through hashing is
   impact on path MTU discovery.  An ICMPv6 type 2 PTB message generated
   on an intermediate device for a packet sent from a server that is
   part of an ECMP load balanced service to a client will have the load
   balanced anycast address as the destination and hence will be
   statelessly load balanced to one of the servers.  While the ICMPv6
   PTB message contains as much of the packet that could not be
   forwarded as possible, the payload headers are not considered in the
   forwarding decision and are ignored.  Because the PTB message is not
   identifiable as part of the original flow by the IP or upper layer
   packet headers, the results of the ICMPv6 ECMP hash calculation are
   unlikely to be hashed to the same nexthop as packets matching the TCP
   or UDP ECMP hash of the flow.

   An example packet flow and topology follow.  The packet for which the
   PTB message was generated was intended for the client.

   ptb -> router ecmp -> nexthop L4/L7 load balancer -> destination

     router --> load balancer 1 --->
          \\--> load balancer 2 ---> load-balanced service
           \--> load balancer N --->

                                 Figure 1

   The router ECMP decision is used because it is part of the forwarding
   architecture, can be performed at line rate, and does not depend on
   shared state or coordination across a distributed forwarding system
   which may include multiple linecards or routers.  The ECMP routing
   decision is deterministic with respect to packets having the same
   computed hash.

   A typical case where ICMPv6 PTB messages are received at the load
   balancer is a case where the path MTU from the client to the load
   balancer is limited by a tunnel in which the client itself is not
   aware of.

   Direct experience says that the frequency of PTB messages is small
   compared to total flows.  One possible conclusion being that tunneled
   IPv6 deployments that cannot carry 1500 MTU packets are relatively
   rare.  Techniques employed by clients such as happy-eyeballs may
   actually contribute some amelioration to the IPv6 client experience
   by preferring IPv4 in cases that might be identified as failures.

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   Still, the expectation of operators is that PMTUD should work and
   that unnecessary breakage of client traffic should be avoided.

   A final observation regarding server tuning is that it is not always
   possible even if it is potentially desirable to be able to
   independently set the TCP MSS for different address families on some
   end-systems.  On Linux platforms, advmss may be set on a per route
   basis for selected destinations in cases where discrimination by
   route is possible.

   The problem as described does also impact IPv4; however
   implementation of RFC 4821 [RFC4821] TCP MTU probing, the ability to
   fragment on wire at tunnel ingress points and the relative rarity of
   sub-1500 byte MTUs that are not coupled to changes in client behavior
   (for example, endpoint VPN clients set the tunnel interface MTU
   accordingly to avoid fragmentation for performance reasons) makes the
   problem sufficiently rare that some existing deployments have choosen
   to ignore it.

3.  Mitigation

   Mitigation of the potential for PTB messages to be mis-delivered
   involves ensuring that an ICMPv6 error message is distributed to the
   same anycast server responsible for the flow for which the error is
   generated.  Ideally, mitigation could be done by the mechanism hosts
   use to identify the flow, by looking into the payload of the ICMPv6
   message (to determine which TCP flow it was associated with) before
   making a forwarding decision.  Because the encapsulated IP header
   occurs at a fixed offset in the ICMP message it is not outside the
   realm of possibility that routers with sufficient header processing
   capability could parse that far into the payload.  Employing a
   mediation device that handles the parsing and distribution of PTB
   messages after policy routing or on each load-balancer/server is a
   possibility.

   Another mitigation approach is predicated upon distributing the PTB
   message to all anycast servers under the assumption that the one for
   which the message was intended will be able to match it to the flow
   and update the route cache with the new MTU and that devices not able
   to match the flow will discard these packets.  Such distribution has
   potentially significant implications for resource consumption and for
   self-inflicted denial-of-service if not carefully employed.
   Fortunately, in real-world deployments we have observed that the
   number of flows for which this problem occurs is relatively small
   (example, 10 or fewer pps on 1Gb/s or more worth of https traffic in
   a real world deployment); sensible ingress rate limiters which will
   discard excessive message volume can be applied to protect even very

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   large anycast server tiers with the potential for fallout limited to
   circumstances of deliberate duress.

3.1.  Alternative Mitigations

   As an alternative, it may be appropriate to lower the TCP MSS to 1220
   in order to accommodate 1280 byte MTU.  We consider this undesirable
   as hosts may not be able to independently set TCP MSS by address-
   family thereby impacting IPv4, or alternatively that middle-boxes
   need to be employed to clamp the MSS independently from the end-
   systems.  Potentially, extension headers might further alter the
   lower bound that the MSS would have to be set to, making clamping
   still more undesirable.

3.2.  Implementation

   1.  Filter-based-forwarding matches next-header ICMPv6 type-2 and
       matches a next-hop on a particular subnet directly attached to 1
       or more routers.  The filter is policed to reasonable limits (we
       chose 1000pps, more conservative rates might be required in other
       implementations).

   2.  Filter is applied on input side of all external (internet or
       customer facing) interfaces.

   3.  A proxy located at the next-hop forwards ICMPv6 type-2 packets
       received at the next-hop to an Ethernet broadcast address
       (example ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff) on all specified subnets.  This was
       necessitated by router inability (in IPv6) to forward the same
       packet to multiple unicast next-hops.

   4.  Anycasted servers receive the PTB error and process packet as
       needed.

   A simple Python scapy script that can perform the ICMPv6 proxy
   reflection is included.

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         #!/usr/bin/python

         from scapy.all import *

         IFACE_OUT = ["p2p1", "p2p2"]

         def icmp6_callback(pkt):
             if pkt.haslayer(IPv6) and (ICMPv6PacketTooBig in pkt) \
             and pkt[Ether].dst != 'ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff':
                 del(pkt[Ether].src)
                 pkt[Ether].dst = 'ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff'
                 pkt.show()
                 for iface in IFACE_OUT:
                     sendp(pkt, iface=iface)

         def main():
             sniff(prn=icmp6_callback, filter="icmp6 \
             and (ip6[40+0] == 2)", store=0)

         if __name__ == '__main__':
             main()

   This example script listens on all interfaces for IPv6 PTB errors
   being forwarded using filter-based-forwarding.  It removes the
   existing Ethernet source and rewrites a new Ethernet destination of
   the Ethernet broadcast address.  It then sends the resulting frame
   out the p2p1 and p2p2 interfaces which attached to vlans where our
   anycast servers reside.

3.2.1.  Alternative Implementation

   Alternatively, network designs in which a common layer 2 network
   exists on the ECMP hop could distribute the proxy onto the end
   systems, eliminating the need for policy routing.  They could then
   rewrite the destination -- for example, using iptables before
   forwarding the packet back to the network containing all of the
   server or load balancer interfaces.  This implmentation can be done
   entirely within the Linux iptables firewall.  Because of the
   distributed nature of the filter, more conservative rate limits are
   required than when a global rate limit can be employed.

   An example ip6tables / nftables rule to match icmp6 traffic, not
   match broadcast traffic, impose a rate limit of 10 pps, and pass to a
   target destination would resemble:

       ip6tables -I INPUT -i lo -p icmpv6 -m icmpv6 --icmpv6-type 2/0 \
       -m pkttype ! --pkt-type broadcast -m limit --limit 10/second \
       -j TEE 2001:DB8::1

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   As with the scapy example, once the destination has been rewritten
   from a hardcoded ND entry to an Ethernet broadcast address -- in this
   case to an IPv6 documentation address -- the traffic will be
   reflected to all the hosts on the subnet.

4.  Improvements

   There are several ways that improvements could be made to the problem
   how to ECMP load balance of ICMPv6 PTB messages. little in the way of
   Internet protocol specification change is required, rather we forsee
   practical implemention change which insofar as we are aware does not
   exist in current router switch or layer3/4 load balancers.
   alternatively improved behavior on the part of client/server
   detection of path mtu in band could render the behavior of devices in
   the path irrelevant.

   1.  Routers with sufficient capacity within the lookup process could
       parse all the way through the L3 or L4 header in the ICMPv6
       payload beginning at bit offset 32 of the ICMP header.  By
       reordering the elements of the hash to match the inward direction
       of the flow, the PTB error could be directed to the same next-hop
       as the incoming packets in the flow.

   2.  The FIB (Forwarding Information Base) on the router could be
       programmed with a multicast distribution tree that included all
       of the necessary next-hops, and unicast ICMPv6 packets could be
       policy routed to these destinations.

   3.  Ubiquitous implementation of RFC 4821 [RFC4821] Packetization
       Layer Path MTU Discovery would probably go a long way towards
       reducing dependence on ICMPv6 PTB by end systems.

5.  Acknowledgements

   The authors would like to thank Marak Majkowsiki for contributing
   text, examples, and a very close review.  The authors would like to
   thank Mark Andrews, Brian Carpenter, Nick Hilliard and Ray Hunter,
   for review.

6.  IANA Considerations

   This memo includes no request to IANA.

7.  Security Considerations

   The employed mitigation has the potential to greatly amplify the
   impact of a deliberately malicious sending of ICMPv6 PTB messages.
   Sensible ingress rate limiting can reduce the potential for impact;

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   however, legitimate traffic may be lost once the rate limit is
   reached.

   The proxy replication results in devices not associated with the flow
   that generated the PTB being recipients of an ICMPv6 message which
   contains a fragment of a packet.  This could arguably result in
   information disclosure.  Recipient machines should be in a common
   administrative domain.

8.  Informative References

   [RFC4821]  Mathis, M. and J. Heffner, "Packetization Layer Path MTU
              Discovery", RFC 4821, DOI 10.17487/RFC4821, March 2007,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4821>.

Authors' Addresses

   Matt Byerly
   Fastly
   Kapolei, HI
   US

   Email: suckawha@gmail.com

   Matt Hite
   Evernote
   Redwood City, CA
   US

   Email: mhite@hotmail.com

   Joel Jaeggli
   Fastly
   Mountain View, CA
   US

   Email: joelja@gmail.com

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