Internet Engineering Task Force S. Perreault, Ed.
Internet-Draft Viagenie
Intended status: BCP I. Yamagata
Expires: September 13, 2011 S. Miyakawa
NTT Communications
A. Nakagawa
Japan Internet Exchange (JPIX)
H. Ashida
iTSCOM
March 12, 2011
Common requirements for IP address sharing schemes
draft-ietf-behave-lsn-requirements-01
Abstract
This document defines common requirements for Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN)
devices.
Status of this Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted to IETF in full conformance with the
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2011 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Requirements for CGN devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Logging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Bulk Port Allocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
8. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
9. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
9.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
9.2. Informative Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Appendix A. Change Log (to be removed by RFC Editor prior to
publication) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
A.1. Changed in -01 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
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1. Introduction
With the shortage of IPv4 addresses, it is expected that more ISPs
may want to provide a service where a public IPv4 address would be
shared by many subscribers (also known as NAT444
[I-D.shirasaki-nat444-isp-shared-addr]). Each subscriber is assigned
a private address, and a NAT device situated in the ISPs network
translates between private and public addresses.
This is not to be considered a solution to the shortage of IPv4
addresses. It is a service that can conceivably be offered alongside
others, such as IPv6 services or regular, un-NATed IPv4 service.
Some ISPs started offering such a service long before there was a
shortage of IPv4 addresses, showing that there are driving forces
other than the shortage of IPv4 addresses.
This document describes behavioural requirements that are to be
expected of those ISP-controlled NAT devices. Meeting this set of
requirements will greatly increase the likelihood that subscribers'
applications will function properly.
Readers should be aware of potential issues that may arise when
sharing public address between many subscribers. See
[I-D.ford-shared-addressing-issues] for details.
This document builds upon previous works describing requirements for
generic NAT devices.[RFC4787][RFC5382][RFC5508]. These documents
still apply in this context. What follows are additional
requirements, to be satisfied on top of previous ones.
2. Terminology
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 [RFC2119].
Readers are expected to be familiar with [RFC4787] and the terms
defined there. The following term is used in this document:
Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN): NAT device placed between a subscriber and
the Internet in an ISP's network. A CGN translates IP addresses
and transport-protocol port numbers in the packets that it
forwards across the border between the internal and external
realms.
Note that the term "carrier-grade" has nothing to do with the
quality of the NAT device; that is left to discretion of
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implementors. Rather, it is to be understood as a topological
qualifier: the NAT device is placed in an ISP's network and
translates the traffic of potentially many subscribers. Those
have limited or no control over the CGN, whereas they typically
have full control over a NAT placed on their premises.
Figure 1 summarises the network topology in which CGN devices
operate.
.
:
| Internet
............... | ...................
| ISP network
|
|
++------++ External realm
........... | CGN |...............
++------++ Internal realm
| |
| |
| | ISP network
............. | .. | ................
| | Customer premises
++------++ ++------++
| CPE1 | | CPE2 | etc.
++------++ ++------++
Figure 1: CGN network topology
3. Requirements for CGN devices
What follows is a list of requirements for CGN devices. They are in
addition to those found in other documents such as [RFC4787],
[RFC5382], and [RFC5508].
REQ-1: A CGN MUST have an "IP address pooling" behaviour of
"Paired".
Justification: This is a stronger form of REQ-2 from [RFC4787].
Note that this requirement applies regardless of the transport
protocol. In other words, a CGN must use the same external IP
address mapping for all sessions associated with the same internal
IP address, be they TCP, UDP, ICMP, something else, or a mix of
different protocols.
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REQ-2: A CGN SHOULD limit the number of external ports (or,
equivalently, "identifiers" for ICMP) that are assigned per CPE.
A. Limits SHOULD be configurable by the CGN administrator.
B. Limits MAY be configured and applied independently per
transport protocol.
C. Additionally, it SHOULD be possible to limit the rate at which
external ports are allocated.
Justification: A CGN can be considered a network resource that is
shared by competing subscribers. Limiting the number of external
ports assigned to each CPE mitigates the DoS attack that a
subscriber could launch against the CGN in order to get a larger
share of the resource. It ensures fairness among subscribers.
Limiting the rate of allocation is intended to further help
mitigate DoS attacks.
REQ-3: A CGN SHOULD limit the number of TCP sessions per CPE.
A. Limits SHOULD be configurable by the CGN administrator.
B. Additionally, it SHOULD be possible to limit the rate at which
TCP sessions are instanciated.
Justification: A NAT needs to keep track of TCP sessions associated
to each mapping. This state consumes resources for which, in the
case of a CGN, subscribers may compete. It is necessary to ensure
that each subscriber has access to a faire share of the CGN's
resources. Limiting TCP sessions per CPE and per time unit is an
effective mitigation against inter-subscriber DoS attacks.
Limiting the rate of TCP session instanciation is intended to
further help mitigate DoS attacks.
REQ-4: It SHOULD be possible to administratively turn off
translation for specific destination addresses and/or ports.
Justification: It is common for a CGN administrator to provide
access for subscribers to servers installed in the ISP's network,
in the external realm. When such a server is able to reach the
internal realm via normal routing (which is entirely controlled by
the ISP), translation is unneeded. In that case, the CGN may
forward packets without modification, thus acting like a plain
router. This may represent an important efficiency gain.
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Figure 2 illustrates this use-case.
X1:x1 X1':x1' X2:x2
+---+from X1:x1 +---+from X1:x1 +---+
| | to X2:x2 | | to X2:x2 | S |
| C |>>>>>>>>>>>>| C |>>>>>>>>>>>>>>| e |
| P | | G | | r |
| E |<<<<<<<<<<<<| N |<<<<<<<<<<<<<<| v |
| |from X2:x2 | |from X2:x2 | e |
| | to X1:x1 | | to X1:x1 | r |
+---+ +---+ +---+
Figure 2: CGN pass-through
REQ-5: It is RECOMMENDED that a CGN have an "Endpoint-Independent
Filtering" behaviour.
Justification: This is a stronger form of REQ-8 from [RFC4787]. An
"Address-Dependent Filtering" behaviour is NOT RECOMMENDED. This
is based on the observation that some games and peer-to-peer
applications require EIF for the NAT traversal to work. In the
context of a CGN it is important to minimise application breakage.
REQ-6: When a CGN loses state (due to a crash, reboot, failover to a
cold standby, etc.), it MUST start using a different external
address pool.
Justification: This is necessary in order to prevent collisions
between old and new mappings and sessions. It ensures that all
established sessions are broken instead of redirected to a
different peer. The previous address pool MAY of course be reused
after a second loss of state.
4. Logging
It may be necessary for CGN administrators to be able to identify a
subscriber based on external IPv4 address, port, and timestamp in
order to deal with abuse and lawful intercept requests. When
multiple subscribers share a single external address, the source
address and port that are visible at the destination host have been
translated from the ones originated by the CPE.
In order to be able to do this, the CGN needs to log the following
information for each mapping created:
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o internal source address
o internal source port
o external source address
o external source port
o destination address (but see below)
o destination port (but see below)
o timestamp
A disadvantage of this is that CGNs under heavy usage may produce
large amounts of logs, which may require large storage volume.
Readers should be aware of logging recommendations for Internet-
facing servers [I-D.ietf-intarea-server-logging-recommendations].
With compliant servers, the destination address and port do not need
to be logged by the CGN. This can help reduce the amount of logging.
5. Bulk Port Allocation
So far we have assumed that a CGN allocates one external port for
every outgoing connection. In this section, the impacts of
allocating multiple external ports at a time are discussed.
There is a range of things a CGN can do:
1. For every outgoing connection, allocate one external port.
2. For an outgoing connection, create a "bin" of several random
external ports. Subsequent outgoing connections will use ports
from the "bin". When the "bin" is full, a new connection causes
a new bin to be created. A bin is smaller or equal to the user's
maximum port limit.
3. Same as (2), but the ports allocated to a "bin" are consecutive
instead of random.
Impacts are as follows.
Port Utilization: The mechanisms at the top of the list are very
efficient in their port utilization. In that sense, they have
good scaling properties (nothing is wasted). The mechanisms at
the bottom of the list will waste ports. The number of wasted
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ports is proportional to size of the "bin".
Logging: Mechanism (1) creates a lot of log entries. Mechanisms (2)
and (3) create the same number of log entries, but (3)'s log
entries are smaller because a range can be expressed very
compactly by indicating a range (e.g. "12000-12009"). With large
"bin" sizes, the logging for mechanisms (2) and (3) can approach
the logging frequency of DHCP servers.
Mechanism (1) can log destinations while mechanisms (2) and (3)
cannot. This means that a CGN implementing one of the latter two
will rely on the remote peer to follow the recommendations in
[I-D.ietf-intarea-server-logging-recommendations]. If this is not
acceptable, mechanisms (2) and (3) cannot be used.
Security: Mechanisms (1) and (2) provide very good security in that
ports numbers are not easily guessed. Easily guessed port numbers
put subscribers at risk of the attacks described in [RFC6056].
Mechanism (3) provides poor security to subscribers, especially if
the "bin" size is small.
6. IANA Considerations
There are no IANA considerations.
7. Security Considerations
If a malicious subscriber can spoof another subscriber's CPE, it may
cause a DoS to that subscriber by creating mappings up to the allowed
limit. Therefore, the CGN administrator SHOULD ensure that spoofing
is impossible. This can be accomplished with ingress filtering, as
described in [RFC2827].
8. Acknowledgements
Thanks for the input and review by Tomohiro Nishitani, Yasuhiro
Shirasaki, Takeshi Tomochika, Kousuke Shishikura, Dai Kuwabara,
Tomoya Yoshida, Takanori Mizuguchi, Arifumi Matsumoto, Tomohiro
Fujisaki, Dan Wing, and Dave Thaler. Dan Wing contributed much of
section 5.
9. References
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9.1. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[RFC2827] Ferguson, P. and D. Senie, "Network Ingress Filtering:
Defeating Denial of Service Attacks which employ IP Source
Address Spoofing", BCP 38, RFC 2827, May 2000.
[RFC4787] Audet, F. and C. Jennings, "Network Address Translation
(NAT) Behavioral Requirements for Unicast UDP", BCP 127,
RFC 4787, January 2007.
[RFC5382] Guha, S., Biswas, K., Ford, B., Sivakumar, S., and P.
Srisuresh, "NAT Behavioral Requirements for TCP", BCP 142,
RFC 5382, October 2008.
[RFC5508] Srisuresh, P., Ford, B., Sivakumar, S., and S. Guha, "NAT
Behavioral Requirements for ICMP", BCP 148, RFC 5508,
April 2009.
[RFC6056] Larsen, M. and F. Gont, "Recommendations for Transport-
Protocol Port Randomization", BCP 156, RFC 6056,
January 2011.
9.2. Informative Reference
[I-D.shirasaki-nat444-isp-shared-addr]
Shirasaki, Y., Miyakawa, S., Nakagawa, A., Yamaguchi, J.,
and H. Ashida, "NAT444 addressing models",
draft-shirasaki-nat444-isp-shared-addr-05 (work in
progress), January 2011.
[I-D.ford-shared-addressing-issues]
Ford, M., Boucadair, M., Durand, A., Levis, P., and P.
Roberts, "Issues with IP Address Sharing",
draft-ford-shared-addressing-issues-02 (work in progress),
March 2010.
[I-D.ietf-intarea-server-logging-recommendations]
Durand, A., Gashinsky, I., Lee, D., and S. Sheppard,
"Logging recommendations for Internet facing servers",
draft-ietf-intarea-server-logging-recommendations-03 (work
in progress), February 2011.
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Appendix A. Change Log (to be removed by RFC Editor prior to
publication)
A.1. Changed in -01
o Terminology: LSN is now CGN.
o Imported all requirements from RFCs 4787, 5382, and 5508. This
allowed us to eliminate some duplication.
o Added references to
draft-ietf-intarea-server-logging-recommendations and
draft-ford-shared-addressing-issues.
o Incorporated a requirement from
draft-xu-behave-stateful-nat-standby-06.
Authors' Addresses
Simon Perreault (editor)
Viagenie
2875 boul. Laurier, suite D2-630
Quebec, QC G1V 2M2
Canada
Phone: +1 418 656 9254
Email: simon.perreault@viagenie.ca
URI: http://www.viagenie.ca
Ikuhei Yamagata
NTT Communications Corporation
Gran Park Tower 17F, 3-4-1 Shibaura, Minato-ku
Tokyo 108-8118
Japan
Phone: +81 50 3812 4704
Email: ikuhei@nttv6.jp
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Shin Miyakawa
NTT Communications Corporation
Gran Park Tower 17F, 3-4-1 Shibaura, Minato-ku
Tokyo 108-8118
Japan
Phone: +81 50 3812 4695
Email: miyakawa@nttv6.jp
Akira Nakagawa
Japan Internet Exchange Co., Ltd. (JPIX)
Otemachi Building 21F, 1-8-1 Otemachi, Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo 100-0004
Japan
Phone: +81 90 9242 2717
Email: a-nakagawa@jpix.ad.jp
Hiroyuki Ashida
its communications Inc.
541-1 Ichigao-cho Aoba-ku
Yokohama 225-0024
Japan
Email: ashida@itscom.ad.jp
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