Path Aware Networking RG                                     B. Trammell
Internet-Draft                                   Google Switzerland GmbH
Intended status: Informational                         December 24, 2019
Expires: June 26, 2020


            Current Open Questions in Path Aware Networking
                     draft-irtf-panrg-questions-04

Abstract

   In contrast to the present Internet architecture, a path-aware
   internetworking architecture has two important properties: it exposes
   the properties of available Internet paths to endpoints, and provides
   for endpoints and applications to use these properties to select
   paths through the Internet for their traffic.  This document poses
   questions in path-aware networking open as of 2019, that must be
   answered in the design, development, and deployment of path-aware
   intetnetworks.  It was originally written to frame discussions in the
   Path Aware Networking proposed Research Group (PANRG), and has been
   published to snapshot current thinking in this space.

Status of This Memo

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   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction to Path-Aware Networking . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.1.  A Vocabulary of Path Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
     2.2.  Discovery, Distribution, and Trustworthiness of Path
           Properties  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     2.3.  Supporting Path Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     2.4.  Interfaces for Path Awareness . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
     2.5.  Implications of Path Awareness for the Data Plane . . . .   5
     2.6.  What is an Endpoint?  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     2.7.  Operating a Path Aware Network  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
     2.8.  Deploying a Path Aware Network  . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   3.  Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   4.  References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
     4.1.  Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
     4.2.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8

1.  Introduction to Path-Aware Networking

   In the current Internet architecture, the interdomain network layer
   provides an unverifiable, best-effort service: an application can
   assume that a packet with a given destination address will eventually
   be forwarded toward that destination, but little else.  A transport
   layer protocol such as TCP can provide reliability over this best-
   effort service, and a protocol above the network layer such as IPsec
   AH [RFC4302] or TLS [RFC5246] can authenticate the remote endpoint.
   However, no explicit information about the path is available, and
   assumptions about that path sometimes do not hold, sometimes with
   serious impacts on the application, as in the case with BGP hijacking
   attacks.

   By contrast, in a path-aware internetworking architecture, endpoints
   have the ability to select or influence the path through the network
   used by any given packet, and the network and transport layers
   explicitly expose information about the path or paths available
   between two endpoints to those endpoints and the applications running
   on them, so that they can make this selection.

   Path selection provides transparency and control to applications and
   users of the network.  Selection may be made at either the



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   application layer or the transport layer.  Path control at the packet
   level enables the design of new transport protocols that can leverage
   multipath connectivity across maximally-disjoint paths through the
   Internet, even over a single physical interface.  When exposed to
   applications, or to end-users through a system configuration
   interface, path control allows the specification of constraints on
   the paths that traffic should traverse, for instance to confound
   passive surveillance in the network core.

   We note that this property of "path awareness" already exists in many
   Internet-connected networks in an intradomain context.  Indeed, much
   of the practice of network engineering using encapsulation at layer 3
   can be said to be "path aware", in that it explicitly assigns traffic
   at tunnel endpoints to a given path within the network.  Path-aware
   internetworking seeks to extend this awareness across domain
   boundaries without resorting to overlays, except as a transition
   technology.

2.  Questions

   Realizing path-aware networking requires answers to a set of open
   research questions.  This document poses these questions, as a
   starting point for discussions about how to realize path awareness in
   the Internet, and to direct future research efforts within the Path
   Aware Networking Research Group.

2.1.  A Vocabulary of Path Properties

   In order for information about paths to be exposed to an endpoint,
   and for the endpoint to make use of that information, it is necessary
   to define a common vocabulary for paths through an internetwork, and
   properties of those paths.  The elements of this vocabulary could
   include terminology for components of a path and properties defined
   for these components, for the entire path, or for subpaths of a path.
   These properties may be relatively static, such as the presence of a
   given node or service function on the path; as well as relatively
   dynamic, such as the current values of metrics such as loss and
   latency.

   This vocabulary must be defined carefully, as its design will have
   impacts on the expressiveness of a given path-aware internetworking
   architecture.  This expressiveness also exhibits tradeoffs.  For
   example, a system that exposes node-level information for the
   topology through each network would maximize information about the
   individual components of the path at the endpoints, at the expense of
   making internal network topology universally public, which may be in
   conflict with the business goals of each network's operator.
   Furthermore, properties related to individual components of the path



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   may change frequently and may quickly become outdated.  However,
   aggregating the properties of individual components to distill end-
   to-end properties for the entire path is not trivial.

   The first question: how are paths and path properties defined and
   represented?

2.2.  Discovery, Distribution, and Trustworthiness of Path Properties

   Once endpoints and networks have a shared vocabulary for expressing
   path properties, the network must have some method for distributing
   those path properties to the endpoint.  Regardless of how path
   property information is distributed to the endpoints, the endpoints
   require a method to authenticate the properties - to determine that
   they originated from and pertain to the path that they purport to.

   Choices in distribution and authentication methods will have impacts
   on the scalability of a path-aware architecture.  Possible dimensions
   in the space of distribution methods include in-band versus out-of-
   band, push versus pull versus publish-subscribe, and so on.  There
   are temporal issues with path property dissemination as well,
   especially with dynamic properties, since the measurement or
   elicitation of dynamic properties may be outdated by the time that
   information is available at the endpoints, and interactions between
   the measurement and dissemination delay may exhibit pathological
   behavior for unlucky points in the parameter space.

   The second question: how do endpoints get access to trustworthy path
   properties?

2.3.  Supporting Path Selection

   Access to trustworthy path properties is only half of the challenge
   in establishing a path-aware architecture.  Endpoints must be able to
   use this information in order to select paths for traffic they send.
   As with the dissemination of path properties, choices made in path
   selection methods will also have an impact on the tradeoff between
   scalability and expressiveness of a path-aware architecture.  One key
   choice here is between in-band and out-of-band control of path
   selection.  Another is granularity of path selection (whether per
   packet, per flow, or per larger aggregate), which also has a large
   impact on the scalabilty/expressiveness tradeoff.  Path selection
   must, like path property information, be trustworthy, such that the
   result of a path selection at an endpoint is predictable.

   The third question: how can endpoints select paths to use for traffic
   in a way that can be trusted by both the network and the endpoints?




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2.4.  Interfaces for Path Awareness

   In order for applications to make effective use of a path-aware
   networking architecture, the control interfaces presented by the
   network and transport layers must also expose path properties to the
   application in a useful way, and provide a useful set of paths among
   which the application can select.  Path selection must be possible
   based not only on the preferences and policies of the application
   developer, but of end-users as well.  Also, the path selection
   interfaces presented to applications and end users will need to
   support multiple levels of granularity.  Most applications'
   requirements can be satisfied with the expression path selection
   policies in terms of properties of the paths, while some applications
   may need finer-grained, per-path control.

   The fourth question: how can interfaces to the transport and
   application layers support the use of path awareness?

2.5.  Implications of Path Awareness for the Data Plane

   In the current Internet, the basic assumption that at a given time t
   all traffic for a given flow will traverse a single path, for some
   definition of path, generally holds.  In a path aware network, this
   assumption no longer holds.  The absence of this assumption has
   implications for the design of protocols above any path-aware network
   layer.

   For example, one advantage of multipath communication is that a given
   end-to-end flow can be "sprayed" along multiple paths in order to
   confound attempts to collect data or metadata from those flows for
   pervasive surveillance purposes [RFC7624].  However, the benefits of
   this approach are reduced if the upper-layer protocols use linkable
   identifiers on packets belonging to the same flow across different
   paths.  Clients may mitigate linkability by opting to not re-use
   cleartext connection identifiers, such as TLS session IDs or tickets,
   on separate paths.  The privacy-conscious strategies required for
   effective privacy in a path-aware Internet are only possible if
   higher-layer protocols such as TLS permit clients to obtain
   unlinkable identifiers.

   The fifth question: how should transport-layer and higher layer
   protocols be redesigned to work most effectively over a path-aware
   networking layer?








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2.6.  What is an Endpoint?

   The vision of path-aware networking articulated so far makes an
   assumption that path properties will be disseminated to endpoints on
   which applications are running (terminals with user agents, servers,
   and so on).  However, incremental deployment may require that a path-
   aware network "core" be used to interconnect islands of legacy
   protocol networks.  In these cases, it is the gateways, not the
   application endpoints, that receive path properties and make path
   selections for that traffic.  The interfaces provided by this gateway
   are necessarily different than those a path-aware networking layer
   provides to its transport and application layers, and the path
   property information the gateway needs and makes available over those
   interfaces may also be different.

   The sixth question: how is path awareness (in terms of vocabulary and
   interfaces) different when applied to tunnel and overlay endpoints?

2.7.  Operating a Path Aware Network

   The network operations model in the current Internet architecture
   assumes that traffic flows are controlled by the decisions and
   policies made by network operators, as expressed in interdomain
   routing protocols.  In a network providing path selection to the
   endpoints, however, this assumption no longer holds, as endpoints may
   react to path properties by selecting alternate paths.  Competing
   control inputs from path-aware endpoints and the interdomain routing
   control plane may lead to more difficult traffic engineering or
   nonconvergent forwarding, especially if the endpoints' and operators'
   notion of the "best" path for given traffic diverges significantly.

   A concept for path aware network operations will need to have clear
   methods for the resolution of apparent (if not actual) conflicts of
   intent between the network's operator and the path selection at an
   endpoint.  It will also need set of safety principles to ensure that
   increasing path control does not lead to decreasing connectivity; one
   such safety principle could be "the existence of at least one path
   between two endpoints guarantees the selection of at least one path
   between those endpoints."

   The seventh question: how can a path aware network in a path aware
   internetwork be effectively operated, given control inputs from the
   network administrator as well as from the endpoints?








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2.8.  Deploying a Path Aware Network

   The vision presented in the introduction discusses path aware
   networking from the point of view of the benefits accruing at the
   endpoints, to designers of transport protocols and applications as
   well as to the end users of those applications.  However, this vision
   requires action not only at the endpoints but within the
   interconnected networks offering path aware connectivity.  While the
   specific actions required are a matter of the design and
   implementation of a specific realization of a path aware protocol
   stack, it is clear than any path aware architecture will require
   network operators to give up some control of their networks over to
   endpoint-driven control inputs.

   Here the question of apparent versus actual conflicts of intent
   arises again: certain network operations requirements may appear
   essential, but are merely accidents of the interfaces provided by
   current routing and management protocols.  Incentives for deployment
   must show how existing network operations requirements are met
   through new path selection and property dissemination mechanisms.

   The incentives for network operators and equipment vendors need to be
   made clear, in terms of a plan to transition [RFC8170] an
   internetwork to path-aware operation, one network and facility at a
   time.  This plan to transition must also take into account that the
   dynamics of path aware networking early in this transition (when few
   endpoints and flows in the Internet use path selection) may be
   different than those later in the transition.

   The eighth question: how can the incentives of network operators and
   end-users be aligned to realize the vision of path aware networking,
   and how can the transition from current ("path-oblivious") to path-
   aware networking be managed?

3.  Acknowledgments

   Many thanks to Adrian Perrig, Jean-Pierre Smith, Mirja Kuehlewind,
   Olivier Bonaventure, Martin Thomson, Shwetha Bhandari, Chris Wood,
   Lee Howard, Mohamed Boucadair, and Thorben Krueger for discussions
   leading to questions in this document, and for feedback on the
   document itself.

   This work is partially supported by the European Commission under
   Horizon 2020 grant agreement no. 688421 Measurement and Architecture
   for a Middleboxed Internet (MAMI), and by the Swiss State Secretariat
   for Education, Research, and Innovation under contract no. 15.0268.
   This support does not imply endorsement.




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4.  References

4.1.  Normative References

   [RFC4302]  Kent, S., "IP Authentication Header", RFC 4302,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC4302, December 2005,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4302>.

   [RFC5246]  Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
              (TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC5246, August 2008,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5246>.

4.2.  Informative References

   [RFC7624]  Barnes, R., Schneier, B., Jennings, C., Hardie, T.,
              Trammell, B., Huitema, C., and D. Borkmann,
              "Confidentiality in the Face of Pervasive Surveillance: A
              Threat Model and Problem Statement", RFC 7624,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC7624, August 2015,
              <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7624>.

   [RFC8170]  Thaler, D., Ed., "Planning for Protocol Adoption and
              Subsequent Transitions", RFC 8170, DOI 10.17487/RFC8170,
              May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8170>.

Author's Address

   Brian Trammell
   Google Switzerland GmbH
   Gustav-Gull-Platz 1
   8004 Zurich
   Switzerland

   Email: ietf@trammell.ch
















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