Reliability-only Ciphersuites for the Bundle Protocol
draft-irtf-dtnrg-bundle-checksum-09

Abstract

The Delay-Tolerant Networking Bundle Protocol includes a custody transfer mechanism to provide acknowledgements of receipt for particular bundles. No checksum is included in the basic DTN Bundle Protocol, however, so at intermediate hops, it is not possible to verify that bundles have been either forwarded or passed through convergence layers without error. Without assurance that a bundle has been received without errors, the custody transfer receipt cannot guarantee that a correct copy of the bundle has been transferred, and errored bundles are forwarded when the destination cannot use the errored content, and discarding the errored bundle early would have been better for performance and throughput reasons. This document addresses that situation by defining new ciphersuites for use within the existing Bundle Security Protocol's Payload Integrity Block (formerly called the Payload Security Block [ED: remove old name before RFC]) to provide error-detection functions that do not require support for other, more complex, security-providing ciphersuites that protect integrity against deliberate modifications. This creates the checksum service needed for error-free reliability, and does so by separating security concerns from the few new reliability-only ciphersuite definitions that are introduced here. The reliability- only ciphersuites given here are intended to protect only against errors and accidental modification; not against deliberate integrity violations. This document discusses the advantages and disadvantages of this approach and the existing constraints that combined to drive this design.

Authors

Wesley Eddy
Lloyd Wood
Will Ivancic

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