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The TCP Service Number Option (SNO)
draft-touch-tcpm-sno-06

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This is an older version of an Internet-Draft whose latest revision state is "Expired".
Author Dr. Joseph D. Touch
Last updated 2016-10-21
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draft-touch-tcpm-sno-06
TCPM WG                                                        J. Touch
Internet Draft                                                  USC/ISI
Intended status: Experimental                          October 21, 2016
Expires: April 2017

                    The TCP Service Number Option (SNO)
                        draft-touch-tcpm-sno-06.txt

Status of this Memo

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Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2016 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
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   warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.

Abstract

   This document specifies a TCP option for service numbers. The
   current SYN destination port is used both to indicate the desired
   service and as a connection demultiplexing field. This option
   separates those two functions, retaining the current destination
   port solely for demultiplexing and indicating the service separately
   in a service number option (SNO). By decoupling these two functions,
   SNO allows a larger number of concurrent connections for a single
   service, as might be useful between fixed addresses of proxies.

Table of Contents

   1. Introduction...................................................3
   2. Conventions used in this document..............................4
   3. Background.....................................................4
      3.1. IANA port numbers.........................................5
      3.2. DNS SRV records...........................................6
      3.3. RPC portmapper and RPCBIND................................6
      3.4. TCPMUX....................................................7
      3.5. Summary of alternatives and comparison to SNO.............8
   4. TCP Service Number Option......................................9
      4.1. Interaction between SNO and the TCP API..................10
         4.1.1. Active OPEN (Unix connect)..........................11
         4.1.2. Passive OPEN (Unix listen)..........................11
         4.1.3. Impact on the TCP OPEN API..........................11
      4.2. Error conditions.........................................12
      4.3. Backward compatibility...................................12
   5. Issues........................................................13
      5.1. Interaction with other protocols and features............13
      5.2. Potential use in other transport protocols...............14

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      5.3. Discussion of alternative approaches.....................15
      5.4. Implementation Issues....................................16
   6. SNO impact on TCP option space................................17
   7. Security Considerations.......................................17
   8. IANA considerations...........................................18
   9. References....................................................18
      9.1. Normative References.....................................18
      9.2. Informative References...................................18
   10. Acknowledgments..............................................20

1. Introduction

   TCP connections are defined by a socket pair, where each TCP socket
   consists of an IP address and a port number. The IP addresses
   indicate the network endpoints (hosts) of the connection, and the
   port numbers allow a pair of IP endpoints to have more than one
   concurrent connection. TCP connections begin when an application on
   one host sends a SYN segment to a waiting application on the other
   host, determined by the destination port in that segment.

   Port numbers thus serve two distinct purposes. For the entirety of a
   connection, they help differentiate concurrent connections as part
   of the socket pair, and are thus used for demultiplexing within a
   host. For the SYN, the destination port also indicates the waiting
   application, i.e., the service for that connection, acting as a
   service identifier.

   Service identifiers need to be coordinated between the endpoints of
   a connection, but need not be coordinated with any other component
   of the network. To avoid the need for explicit pairwise
   coordination, most Internet transport protocols currently use
   globally-assigned destination port numbers as service identifiers;
   this includes TCP, UDP, SCTP, and DCCP [RFC768] [RFC793] [RFC4960]
   [RFC4340]. An assigned port number can be requested from the
   Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) [IANA].

   The use of SYN destination ports as both service identifier and
   demultiplexing identifier can impact TCP performance. For a given
   service, a given pair of endpoints can have at most 2^16 concurrent
   connections, or even connections in the TIME-WAIT state (which is
   typically expected to last two minutes) [To1999]. This limits
   services to at most an average of 550 connections per second, which
   can be a constraint on proxy-to-proxy services.

   To reduce this impact, this document specifies the TCP service
   number option (SNO), which allows services to be specified in an
   option separate from the current header destination port field. SNO

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   decouples the use of ports for connection demultiplexing and state
   management from their use to indicate a desired endpoint service.
   This decoupling can substantially increase the number of concurrent
   connections to 2^32; even considering current expected TIME-WAIT
   delay, that can support up to 35.8M connections per second.

   Although it changes TCP SYNs, it does not otherwise affect the
   processing of other TCP segments or the TCP state machine. SNO must
   be implemented at both ends of a TCP connection to be effective.

2. Conventions used in this document

   In examples, "C:" and "S:" indicate lines sent by the client and
   server respectively.

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in RFC-2119 [RFC2119].

   In this document, these words will appear with that interpretation
   only when in ALL CAPS. Lower case uses of these words are not to be
   interpreted as carrying RFC-2119 significance.

   In this document, the characters ">>" preceding an indented line(s)
   indicates a compliance requirement statement using the key words
   listed above. This convention aids reviewers in quickly identifying
   or finding the explicit compliance requirements of this RFC.

3. Background

   TCP supports multiplexing as one of its six core facilities,
   allowing a single pair of hosts to have multiple concurrent TCP
   sessions (see Sec. 1.5 of [RFC793]). An endpoint address is
   associated with a port number, forming a socket; and "A pair of
   sockets uniquely identifies each connection." Although ports can be
   bound to services uniquely at each endpoint, RFC 793 notes that it
   is useful to attach frequently-used services to fixed ports which
   are publicly known, but that other services may be discovered by
   dynamic means. This document addresses one impact of that
   suggestion, and specifies an alternative which alleviates that
   impact.

   The Internet currently relies on the use of fixed, publicly-agreed
   port numbers for most services, whether for public access (e.g.,
   HTTP, FTP, DNS) or between pre-arranged pairs (e.g., X11, SSL). Some
   of these services use one public port to negotiate other ports for
   further exchanges (e.g., FTP, H.323, RPC).

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   There are several current methods for determining the port for a
   public service:

   o  Index the service in IANA's port registry

   o  Index the service in the host's DNS SRV records

   o  Ask the host directly using an RPC portmapper/bind-like service

   o  Ask the host for a hand-off using the TCPMUX port (port #1)

   Many of these alternatives, including the use of strings as service
   identifiers, were described in principle in RFC 814, and have
   evolved into deployed capabilities [RFC814]. Each of these
   alternatives is summarized below, and each either significantly
   limits the number of concurrent connections for a service or incurs
   additional latency or management overhead compared to SNO.

3.1. IANA port numbers

   The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority currently manages globally
   reserved port numbers [RFC6335]. The desired port number for a
   service is determined either by an operating system index to a copy
   of IANA's table (e.g., getportbyname() in Unix, which indexes the
   /etc/services file), or is fixed in inside the application.

   The port number space 0..65536 is split into three ranges [RFC2780]:

   o  0..1023 "well-known", also called "system" ports

   o  1024..49151 "registered", also called "user" ports

   o  49152..65535 "dynamic", also called "private" ports

   The terms "well-known" and "registered" are misnomers; both of those
   port ranges are managed by IANA, and are equally registered and
   well-known; they are currently known together as "assigned"
   [RFC6335]. System ports are intended for services that run in
   privileged mode, sometimes known as "root", although that
   distinction is blurred in current operating systems.

   IANA-managed ports are allocated globally, for all hosts everywhere
   on the public Internet, even though the meaning of a port need be
   known only for a particular host. A given service is typically
   assigned a single port, which then limits the number of concurrent
   connections between two hosts to 2^16, i.e., the number expressible
   in the source port field. This assumes that the source port can be

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   arbitrary; in may implementations, when a service is bound to a SYN
   destination port it is prohibited for use in other connections,
   e.g., as a source port for outgoing SYNs.

3.2. DNS SRV records

   DNS SRV resource records provide a way to find the port number for a
   service based on its string name [RFC2782]. A host asks the DNS to
   index "_servicename._tcp.hostname" (underscores required) and the
   response is a record that includes both the port number and host's
   IP address.

   SRV records allow port numbers to be allocated on a per-host basis,
   and allow multiple ports to be indicated for a given service. A
   system that wants to support a large number of concurrent HTTP
   connections could advertise the HTTP service as available on the
   entire unassigned (dynamic) port range, in addition to port 80. This
   can increase the number of concurrent connections to 2^30 (2^14
   dynamic ports and 2^16 source ports), which would be nearly as good
   as SNO (2^32).

   However, SRV lookups require an additional protocol exchange for
   each first-time access, which can traverse much of the same path the
   TCP SYN will, i.e., incurring an additional round-trip time of delay
   (because DNS servers are often located near the hosts they serve).
   Further, using SRV records requires that the dynamic ports be
   allocated in advance, and they cannot be reclaimed once advertised.
   SRV advertisement may be useful for a single known service, but does
   not support a larger number of connections for any (or every)
   service on-demand.

   Additional challenges for DNS SRV records are autonomy, robustness,
   and size of the name space. Many hosts do not have control over
   their DNS entries; moving port lookup into the DNS could limit the
   services that a host can deploy for public access. This solution
   also makes the DNS a required part of the Internet architecture,
   even for accessing services on hosts with well-known IP addresses
   (e.g., the DNS itself). This decreases network robustness, because
   access of services on a host depends on access to the DNS.

3.3. RPC portmapper and RPCBIND

   An alternative to indexing the service name at a separate host via
   the DNS would be to contact the intended host directly and request
   the lookup there. This is how the RPC portmapper (v2) and RPCBIND
   (v3 and v4) services work, where the source host contacts the
   destination on port #111 [RFC1833][RFC5531]. This service was

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   designed for the same basic reason as the TCP port option of this
   document: to allow a small subset of a potentially large set of
   services to be dynamically bound to a small number of ports. The
   differences between portmapper and RPCBIND are not important here,
   so they are discussed as a single example.

   In both portmapper and RPCBIND the source host contacts the
   destination host on port 111, and issues a request including the
   desired destination RPC service name. A response indicates the
   appropriate port for that RPC service.

   Like the DNS SRV solution, portmapper/RPCBIND requires a separate
   round-trip (one for UDP; more for TCP) to perform the lookup
   operation. This adds to both the communication overhead and
   connection establishment latency.

   The portmapper service also allows services to be selected on
   version, i.e., to have different versions of a service on different
   ports, accessed using the same version name but a different version
   number. This is handled in some IANA entries, DNS SRV records, and
   TCPMUX by using a port keyword that embeds the version number in the
   name, e.g., 'imap' vs. 'imap3'. In most other cases, versioning is
   indicated and negotiated in-band, inside the protocol (e.g., HTTP).

   Unfortunately, portmapper has the same limitation as DNS SRV
   records; once a port is advertised for a given service, it cannot be
   reclaimed for use by another service. Further, once a given service
   is advertised, it is likely that the requesting host will cache the
   response. As a result, dynamic ports can be used to extend the port
   space for a given service in advance, but they need to be pinned to
   that service when it is first requested from that host. Again, this
   limits the ability to flexibly support large numbers of connections
   for any (or every) service.

3.4. TCPMUX

   TCPMUX is a service on TCP port #1 which allows a host to provide a
   port name handoff service for itself [RFC1078]. A source host opens
   a connection to port 1 on a destination host and transmits
   'portname<CR><LF>' in the data stream; the destination replies with
   either '+<CR><LF>' (yes, the service is available) or '-<CR><LF>'
   (no, the service is not available). If the service is available, the
   connection is transferred to the desired service while still in the
   OPEN state.

   TCPMUX modifies the semantics of TCP connection establishment; its
   connections always succeed, and upon receipt of the named service

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   the application must determine whether to proceed or not. This
   document seeks a more conventional TCP semantics, where unavailable
   services result in a rejected connection (e.g., RST in reply and/or
   ICMP error message).

   TCPMUX further requires all new connections to be received on a
   single port; this again limits the number of connections between two
   machines to 2^16, which provides no benefit compared to existing
   assigned ports as currently used in SYN segments.

3.5. Summary of alternatives and comparison to SNO

   Each of the alternatives presented has a significant limitation.
   These alternatives are summarized as follows:

   o  IANA ports: limits a given service to 2^16 concurrent connections
      between two IP addresses; fewer if system/user/dynamic boundaries
      are preserved

   o  DNS SRV records: requires an extra round-trip exchange for
      lookup, not typically under host control, allows up to 2^30
      concurrent connections but requires that the additional space of
      2^14 be allocated to services on a given host in advance.

   o  Portmapper: requires an extra round-trip exchange for lookup,
      allows up to 2^30 concurrent connections but requires that the
      additional space of 2^14 be allocated to services on a given host
      in advance

   o  TCPMUX: destroys semantics of TCP connection establishment,
      limits connections per endpoint pair to 2^16 over all services

   SNO allows the destination host to associate services with processes
   on a per-connection basis, while avoiding unnecessary additional
   round-trips or connections and also while reducing message overhead.
   This enables every service to support up to 2^32 concurrent
   connections, by decoupling the demultiplexing and service identifier
   role of SYN destination ports.

   The basic operation of SNO is as follows:

   o  The source host issues a SYN, picking both source and destination
      port numbers arbitrarily that are not currently in use (active or
      pending connection).

   o  The SYN includes SNO, which indicates the IANA assigned port
      number of the desired service.

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   o  The destination host, upon receiving the SYN with SNO, determines
      whether the service indicated in the option is running. If so, a
      SYN-ACK is issued with a zero-length SNO, indicating success of
      the lookup and handoff. The service is bound to that connection
      at the destination.

   o  If the service is not available, the appropriate RST and/or ICMP
      error messages are returned.

   The benefits to TCP SNO are that:

   o  For a given service, the number of connections between two given
      IP addresses is no longer limited to 2^16; it is expanded to
      2^32.

   o  SNO support is provided at the same host as the intended service,
      so the fate of both is shared (i.e., it is more robust than
      decoupled service such as DNS SRV).

   o  SNO is embedded in the TCP SYN segment, avoiding extra round
      trips and messages.

   o  NAT traversal is preserved.

   o  TCP connection semantics are maintained, i.e., services not
      available never connect.

4. TCP Service Number Option

   The TCP service number option (SNO) extends the TCP header to
   include a 16-bit port field indicating desired service, as shown in
   Figure 1.

   >> New implementations of TCP MAY implement SNO.

   >> SNO SHOULD NOT appear in any TCP segment except SYN and SYN-ACK.
   SNO MUST be silently ignored if in any segments except SYN and SYN-
   ACK.

   SNO includes the mandatory KIND and LENGTH fields [RFC793], as well
   as the desired service port number. The current specification uses
   the TCP Experimental Option format, with an ExID of 0x5323 in
   network-standard byte order (ASCII for "S#") [RFC6994].

   The KIND is a single octet (byte) which indicates this is an
   experimental option; SNO is supported on both experimental options
   (253 and 254); there is no difference as to which experimental

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   option is used. The LENGTH is a single octet (byte) interpreted as
   an unsigned number that indicates the length of this option in
   octets (bytes), including the KIND and LENGTH fields, as well as the
   octets of the Service-Number.

                    +--------+--------+--------+--------+
                    |   253  |    6   |  0x53  |  0x23  |
                    +--------+--------+--------+--------+
                    |  Service-Number |
                    +--------+--------+

                    Figure 1 TCP SNO SYN option format

   Upon receipt of a TCP SYN segment including SNO ('TCP SYN/SNO'), the
   Service-Number is matched against a list of available services.
   Available services are those that listen on the indicated port
   number. E.g., a web server that listens for incoming connections on
   port 80 will respond to connections with SYN segments with SNO=80.

   The way in which SNO and TCP destination port numbers interacts is
   described in Section 4.1. When an incoming TCP SYN/SNO is considered
   valid, the connection is completed by returning a SYN-ACK with a
   null SNO.

                    +--------+--------+--------+--------+
                    |   253  |    4   |  0x53  |  0x23  |
                    +--------+--------+--------+--------+

             Figure 2 TCP Null SNO format, as used in SYN-ACK

   >> A TCP SYN/SNO answered with a TCP SYN with a non-null SNO (LENGTH
   > 2) or lacking the SNO option MUST cause the initiator to abort the
   connection via issuing a RST and by reporting an error to the
   application as if the port were not available.

   The TCB for that connection is then associated with the process for
   the matching service, which then handles all further interactions
   with the connection.

4.1. Interaction between SNO and the TCP API

   TCP currently uses TCP port numbers to demultiplex connections as
   well as to indicate the desired service at the destination. SNO
   retains the demultiplexing capability, but overrides service
   identification.

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   TCP specifies port numbers for connections in the OPEN command. The
   current OPEN command is described in RFC 793 Sections 2.7 and 3.8
   as:

        OPEN (local port, foreign socket, active/passive
           [, timeout] [, precedence] [, security/compartment]
           [, options])
           -> local connection name

   The OPEN call is used to initiate connections, corresponding to Unix
   connect, and to wait for incoming connection requests, corresponding
   to Unix listen. The impact of the SNO option on each of these
   variants is described below.

4.1.1. Active OPEN (Unix connect)

   During a TCP active OPEN command, SNO interprets the port number of
   foreign TCP socket as the SNO Service-Number and selects a random
   number as the foreign port. The OPEN command can be extended to
   override that random selection by extending the foreign socket to
   include both the service identifier and port number as separate
   fields.

4.1.2. Passive OPEN (Unix listen)

   During a TCP passive OPEN command, SNO interprets the local port
   number as the SNO service identifier. The OPEN command can be
   extended to allow the listening application to also indicate a
   specific destination port by extending the local port to include
   both a service identifier and port number as separate fields.

4.1.3. Impact on the TCP OPEN API

   Both active OPEN and passive OPEN may need to extend the current
   port numbers to include separate service identifiers. It may be
   useful to consider that only one service identifier is ever used,
   e.g., an active OPEN may need a separate foreign service identifier,
   and a passive OPEN may need a separate local service identifier, but
   separate service identifiers for both foreign and local would never
   occur. As a result, it may be more convenient to consider the TCP
   OPEN API as being extended with a single service field as follows:

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        SNOPEN (local port, foreign socket, service, active/passive
           [, timeout] [, precedence] [, security/compartment]
           [, options])
           -> local connection name

   Legacy uses of the OPEN call can be trivially converted to the new
   SNOPEN description. A legacy active OPEN uses the port of the
   foreign socket as the service; a legacy passive OPEN uses the local
   port as the service.

   However, because the most common use is to allow the active foreign
   port or passive local port "float" (be unspecified, and thus filled
   by the OS with an arbitrary value), most implementations will not
   need to modify the TCP OPEN API implementation, or can extend the
   API using a separate interface (e.g., Unix setsockopt).

4.2. Error conditions

   There are two error conditions for a SYN segment with the SNO option
   to be considered:

   o  SNO not supported

   o  Invalid port (i.e., no application listening on that port)

   The case where SNO is not supported is already addressed in TCP as
   an unknown option [RFC793. Implementations are expected to ignore
   it, which means the SYN-ACK would not include the SNO confirmation
   response.

   >> For an invalid port, the receiving TCP should act as it would if
   the destination port were a service that is not available, i.e., it
   SHOULD return an ICMP port unreachable error message [RFC1122]. This
   message MUST include the received TCP header including the SNO
   option in its entirety. The destination TCP MUST also send a RST in
   response. Other interactions are the result of backward
   compatibility, and are discussed in Section 4.3.

4.3. Backward compatibility

   The TCP SNO option is designed to interact correctly only on SNO-
   supporting implementations.

   SNO connection attempts to non-SNO endpoints will be rejected; the
   SNO SYN will receive a non-SNO SYN-ACK, at which point the SNO
   endpoint will terminate the connection attempt.

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   Services on SNO endpoints will support both SNO and non-SNO incoming
   connections, without the need for recompilation or relinking.

   >> Outgoing connections intended to be compatible with both
   implementations MUST either attempt both SNO and non-SNO connections
   in parallel or retry a failed SNO attempt with a non-SNO attempt.

5. Issues

   The TCP SNO option interacts with some other IP and TCP services,
   notably security services. Variants of the option may be useful in
   other transport protocols. Also, there were a number of alternate
   designs considered which this document captures in summary.

5.1. Interaction with other protocols and features

   TCP SNO potentially interacts with any other protocol that
   interprets or modifies TCP port numbers. This includes IPsec and
   other firewall systems, TCP/MD5 and other TCP security mechanisms,
   FTP and other in-band exchange of ports, and network address
   translators (NATs).

   IPsec uses port numbers to perform access control in transport mode
   [RFC4301].  Security policies can define port-specific access
   control (PROTECT, BYPASS, DISCARD), as well as port-specific
   algorithms and keys. Similarly, firewall policies allow or block
   traffic based on port numbers.

   Use of port numbers in IPsec selectors and firewalls may assume that
   the numbers correspond to well-known services. It is useful to note
   that there is no such requirement; any service may run on any port,
   subject to mutual agreement between the endpoint hosts.  Use of SNO
   may interfere with this assumption both within IPsec and in other
   firewalling systems, but it does not add a new vulnerability. New
   implementations of IPsec and firewall systems may want to support
   interpreting SNO in these policy rules, but again should not rely on
   either port numbers to indicate a specific service.

   TCP SNO occupies space in the TCP SYN segment. Such space is
   severely limited in cases where TCP-level security is present, as
   noted in detail in Section 5.

   >> TCP SNO MUST be protected in the same way that the existing SYN
   destination port is protected.

   For IPsec, this is not an issue because the entire TCP header and
   payload are protected by all IPsec modes. None of the TCP header is

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   protected by application-layer security, e.g., TLS, so again this is
   not an issue [RFC5246].

   The resulting primary concern is TCP-level security, e.g., legacy
   TCP/MD5 and its successors TCP-AO [RFC2385][RFC5925]. TCP/MD5 always
   excludes TCP options in its hash calculation; this it fails to
   protect current critical TCP options such as alternate checksums,
   window scale, and timestamp options [RFC793] [RFC7323]. TCP-AO
   allows options to be included or excluded, depending on per-
   connection parameter. This document recommends, as per above, that
   SNO, as all options, be included in TCP-level protection. Note that
   it may be difficult to use SNO together with any of these TCP-layer
   protection mechanisms unless the TCP option space is extended, as
   with TCP EDO and/or EDO-SYN [To2016a][To2016b].

   A number of protocols exchange port numbers in-band, notably to
   coordinate separate concurrent connections, e.g., FTP (file
   transfer) and SIP (teleconferencing) [RFC959][RFC3261]. Because
   these protocols coordinate the specific port numbers in advance,
   there is no need for SNO to indicate the desired service. As a
   result, it is unlikely that it would be useful to augment these
   protocols to support SNO in their creation of subordinate
   connections. SNO could still be useful in establishing the primary
   (first) connection for these services.

   Network address and port translators, known collectively as NATs,
   not only read TCP ports, but may also translate them [RFC2993]. This
   interferes with the use of ports for service identification
   [RFC3234]. SNO may allow services to be identified behind NATs if
   NATs are not further extended to translate SNO. It is thus unknown
   whether SNO will help restore service identification in the presence
   of NATs.

   TCP connections using SNO continue to use IP addresses and ports,
   although both port numbers are typically set arbitrarily.
   Translation of these ports should not interfere with the operation
   of NATs, though this has not been verified and is not a design
   requirement.

5.2. Potential use in other transport protocols

   As noted earlier, SNO may be a useful addition to a variety of other
   transport protocols, such as UDP, SCTP and DCCP [RFC768] [RFC4960]
   [RFC4340]. Adding SNO support to SCTP and DCCP should be
   straightforward because both already have an option space. These are
   not addressed further in this document, because this focuses on TCP
   only.

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   DCCP already includes a Service Code that provides a similar way to
   separately identify services, but these codes are 32 bits and use a
   separate IANA registered space. DCCP does not use Service Codes as a
   way to expand the number of concurrent connections to a given IANA
   transport service.

   UDP lacks options, so adding support for SNO is not feasible.

5.3. Discussion of alternative approaches

   The current proposal assumes that the source TCP selects both source
   and destination port numbers randomly, that SNO occurs only in SYN
   and SYN-ACKs. A number of alternative approaches were considered
   during the development of the approach presented herein. These
   include:

   o  A portmapper-like service that returns a specific port number

   o  Continued demuxing based on SNO

   o  Dynamic overwriting of the destination port

   The first approach, of returning a specific port number for a
   service, requires a separate round trip and messages to initiate a
   connection. We avoid both the additional time and messages in the
   proposed solution which integrates the lookup in the SYN.

   Continued demultiplexing based on SNO would violate TCP connection
   semantics, which indicate that a connection be uniquely identified
   by the 4-tuple: <src addr><src port><dst addr><dst port>. Although
   SNO demuxing would increase the connection tuple space, this seems
   unnecessary as it is already over 2^32 concurrent connections
   between a single pair of host addresses. Finally, this variant
   incurs the SNO option overhead on every message, which seems
   unnecessarily inefficient. The proposed solution is more efficient
   and sufficiently increases the utility of the entire current
   connection name space.

   Dynamic overwriting of the destination port complicates the
   connection establishment on the source side, because the SYN-ACK
   would have a different port pair than the SYN. It would further
   interfere with NAT traversal. The primary utility for overwriting
   the port number would be to facilitate demultiplexing at the
   receiver, but this is should already include the entire 4-tuple
   anyway. Overall, this variant seems unnecessarily complex for no
   real benefit.

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5.4. Implementation Issues

   Prototypes underway in both FreeBSD and Linux indicate substantial
   challenges with implementing SNO due to errors in option processing
   as well as optimizations that interfere with SNO's decoupling of
   service and connection identifiers.

   Option processing has never been sufficiently described to ensure
   interoperable implementation. Both FreeBSD and Linux assume that TCP
   options can be processed at a single location in both incoming and
   outgoing TCP header processing, but this has never been true. In
   particular, options that determine whether a segment is valid (TCP
   MD5, TCP-AO, header checksum, etc.) must be processed before any
   other header fields are interpreted, whereas options that are
   interpreted in the context of header fields (e.g., SACK, etc.) must
   be interpreted afterwards.

   Keeping track of TCP state can require multiple data structures on
   both endpoints, but these structures are currently optimized
   assuming that port numbers are overloaded as both service and
   connection identifiers. Connections can be in any of the following
   11 states: CLOSED, LISTEN, SYN-SENT, SYN-RECEIVED, ESTABLISHED, FIN-
   WAIT-1, FIN-WAIT-2, CLOSE-WAIT, CLOSING, LAST-ACK, TIME-WAIT. CLOSED
   is fictional because no connection context exists. The remaining
   states are often grouped as follows:

   o  LISTEN - no connection state yet; tracking which ports are bound

   o  Active - SYN-SENT, ESTABLISHED, FIN-WAIT-1, FIN-WAIT-2, CLOSE-
      WAIT, CLOSING, and LAST-ACK (sometimes also TIME-WAIT), in which
      full connection state is kept

   There are two states that are typically not kept in detail - SYN-
   RECEIVED and TIME-WAIT. SYN-RECEIVED keeps track of a connection
   that has received a SYN but not yet the final ACK of the three-way
   handshake; it state is typically not kept in detail to avoid DOS
   attacks that overload a server with half-open connections [RFC4987].
   Similarly, the TIME-WAIT state is often ignored or kept in aggregate
   to avoid state accumulation on busy servers [Fa99].

   The challenge implementing SNO involves using the LISTEN queue for
   SYN-RECEIVED states. Connections in the LISTEN state are indexed by
   the service number: for legacy TCP connections, this is the SYN
   destination port, and for SNO connections this is the SNO service
   number. In the SYN-RECEIVED state, connections always need to be
   indexed by the receive port number of the incoming ACK segment. As a
   result, SNO implementations need a distinct SYN-RECEIVED queue; they

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   cannot reuse the LISTEN queue to keep track of pending half-open
   connections.

   The additional state needed for the SYN-RECEIVED queue is the same
   regardless of whether it shares space with the LISTEN queue - each
   receive port for half-open connections needs to be listed. The key
   difference is the index to the queue.

6. SNO impact on TCP option space

   SNO needs to fit inside the available TCP option space, which
   provides 40 bytes for options. It is useful to consider that TCP SYN
   segments may include other options, notably:

   o  4 bytes of MSS [RFC793]

   o  10 bytes of timestamp [RFC7323]

   o  3 bytes of window scale [RFC7323]

   o  2 + 8N bytes of SACK, for N SACK blocks [RFC2018][RFC6675]

   This leaves only 13 bytes for the SNO option (assuming 1 SACK
   block), which is more than sufficient. The experimental variant
   described herein uses 6 bytes; a standards-track variant would use
   only 4 bytes.

7. Security Considerations

   There are four areas of security which the SNO option raises:

   1. Interaction with IPsec and firewalls

   2. Interaction with TCP/MD5 and TCP-AO security

   3. Increased DOS impact

   The impact on IPsec and firewalls is discussed in detail in Section
   5.1. As noted there, SNO defeats the assumption that port numbers
   correspond to specific services, an assumption that was already
   defeated between consenting hosts. The SNO option thus raises no new
   vulnerability.

   The impact of SNO on TCP/MD5 and TCP-AO is also discussed in
   Sections 5.1. Use of these services without inclusion of TCP options
   makes all options vulnerable, including SNO.

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   The additional resources incurred by parsing the SNO option are
   minimal.

8. IANA considerations

   This document specifies a new TCP option that uses the shared
   experimental options format, with ExID = 0x5323 in network-standard
   byte order (representing ASCII "S#") [RFC6994]. This ExID has
   already been registered with IANA.

9. References

9.1. Normative References

   [RFC793]  Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol", STD 7, RFC
             793, Sep. 1981 (STANDARD).

   [RFC1122] Braden, R. (ed.), "Requirements for Internet Hosts -
             Communication Layers", STD 3, RFC 1122, Oct. 1989
             (STANDARD).

   [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
             Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, Mar. 1997 (BEST
             CURRENT PRACTICE).

   [RFC2385] Heffernan, A., "Protection of BGP Sessions via the TCP MD5
             Signature Option", RFC 2385, Aug. 1998 (PROPOSED
             STANDARD).

   [RFC6994] Touch, J., "Shared Use of Experimental TCP Options",
             RFC6994, Aug. 2013 (PROPOSED STANDARD).

9.2. Informative References

   [Fa99]    T. Faber, J. Touch, and W. Yue, "The TIME-WAIT state in
             TCP and Its Effect on Busy Servers", in Proc. IEEE
             Infocom, 1999, pp. 1573-1583.

   [Fr2008]  Freire, S., A. Zuquete, "A TCP-layer name service for TCP
             ports", Proc. Usenix, 2008.

   [IANA]    Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, www.iana.org

   [RFC768]  Postel, J., "User Datagram Protocol", RFC768, Aug. 1980
             (STANDARD).

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   [RFC814]  Clark, D., "NAME, ADDRESSES, PORTS, AND ROUTES", RFC 814,
             Jul. 1982 (UNKNOWN).

   [RFC959]  Postel, J., J. Reynolds, "FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL (FTP)",
             STD 9, RFC 959, Oct. 1985 (STANDARD).

   [RFC1078] Lottor, M., "TCP Port Service Multiplexer (TCPMUX)",
             RFC1078, Nov. 1988 (UNKNOWN).

   [RFC2018] Mathis, M., Mahdavi, J., Floyd, S., and A. Romanow, "TCP
             Selective Acknowledgment Options", RFC 2018, October 1996.

   [RFC5531] Thurlow, R., "RPC: Remote Procedure Call Protocol
             Specification Version 2", RFC 5531, May 2006 (DRAFT
             STANDARD).

   [RFC1833] Srinivasan, R., "Binding Protocols for ONC RPC Version 2",
             RFC 1833, Aug. 1995 (PROPOSED STANDARD).

   [RFC2780] Bradner, S., V. Paxson, "IANA Allocation Guidelines For
             Values In the Internet Protocol and Related Headers", BCP
             37, RFC 2780, Mar. 2000 (BEST CURRENT PRACTICE).

   [RFC2782] Gulbrandsen, A., P. Vixie, L. Esibov, "A DNS RR for
             specifying the location of services (DNS SRV)", RFC 2782,
             Feb. 2000 (PROPOSED STANDARD).

   [RFC2993] Hain, T., "Architectural Implications of NAT", RFC 2993,
             November 2000 (INFORMATIONAL).

   [RFC3234] Carpenter, B., S. Brim, "Middleboxes: Taxonomy and
             Issues", RFC 3234 Feb. 2002 (INFORMATIONAL).

   [RFC3261] Rosenberg, J., H. Schulzrinne, G. Camarillo, A. Johnston,
             J. Peterson, R. Sparks, M. Handley, E. Schooler, "SIP:
             Session Initiation Protocol", RFC 3261, Jun. 2002
             (PROPOSED STANDARD).

   [RFC4301] Kent, S., K. Seo, "Security Architecture for the Internet
             Protocol", RFC4301, Dec. 2005 (PROPOSED STANDARD).

   [RFC4340] Kohler, E., M. Handley, S. Floyd, "Datagram Congestion
             Control Protocol (DCCP)", RFC 4340, Mar. 2006 (PROPOSED
             STANDARD).

   [RFC4960] Stewart, R. (Ed.), "Stream Control Transmission Protocol",
             RFC 4960, Sep. 2007 (PROPOSED STANDARD).

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   [RFC4987] Eddy, W., "TCP SYN Flooding Attacks and Common
             Mitigations", RFC 4987, Aug. 2007.

   [RFC5246] Dierks, T., E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
             (TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246, Aug. 2008 (PROPOSED
             STANDARD).

   [RFC5925] Touch, J., A. Mankin, R. Bonica, "The TCP Authentication
             Option", RFC5925, Jun. 2010 (PROPOSED STANDARD).

   [RFC6335] Cotton, M., L. Eggert, J. Touch, M. Westerlund, S.
             Cheshire "Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
             Procedures for theManagement of the Transport Protocol
             Port Number and Service Name Registry", RFC 6335 / BCP
             165, Aug. 2011.

   [RFC6675] Blanton, E., Allman, M., Wang, L., Jarvinen, I., Kojo, M.,
             and Y. Nishida, "A Conservative Loss Recovery Algorithm
             Based on Selective Acknowledgment (SACK) for TCP", RFC
             6675, August 2012.

   [RFC7323] D. Borman, R. Braden, Jacobson, V., R. Scheffenegger, Ed.,
             "TCP Extensions for High Performance", RFC 7323, May 1992
             (PROPOSED STANDARD).

   [To1999]  Touch, J., T. Faber, "The TIME-WAIT state in TCP and its
             Effect on Busy Servers", Proc. Infocom, 1999.

   [To2006]  Touch, J., "A TCP Option for Port Names", draft-touch-tcp-
             portnames-00.txt (work in progress), Apr. 2006.

   [To2016a] Touch, J., W. Eddy, "TCP Extended Data Offset Option",
             draft-ietf-tcpm-tcp-edo-06 (work in progress), Jun. 2016.

   [To2016b] Touch, J., T. Faber, "TCP SYN Extended Option Space Using
             an Out-of-Band Segment", draft-touch-tcpm-tcp-syn-ext-opt-
             05 (work in progress), Oct. 2016.

10. Acknowledgments

   This work was inspired by discussions on the IETF mailing list,
   notably by suggestions by Keith Moore and Noel Chiappa. Bob Braden
   noted some of the origins of the named service concept.

   This document is based on an earlier version based on using strings
   rather than IANA port numbers, where the receiving host used the
   strings to directly identify services [To2006]. A similar approach

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   was proposed that also used strings was implemented in Linux, except
   that the strings were resolved by a separate server and transmitted
   in the TCP segment as data (e.g., as with TCPMUX) [Fr2008].

   This effort is partly supported by USC/ISI's Postel Center.

   This document was initially prepared using 2-Word-v2.0.template.dot.

Authors' Addresses

   Joe Touch
   USC/ISI
   4676 Admiralty Way
   Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695
   U.S.A.

   Phone: +1 (310) 448-9151
   Email: touch@isi.edu
   URL:   http://www.isi.edu/touch

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