Internet Engineering Task Force P. Savola
Internet-Draft CSC/FUNET
Expires: July 1, 2004 Jan 2004
Simple IPv6-in-IPv4 Tunnel Establishment Procedure (STEP)
draft-savola-v6ops-conftun-setup-02.txt
Status of this Memo
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
This memo describes a set of operational procedures, a UDP
encapsulation for configured tunnels, and one implementation
mechanism to provide a very simple and straightforward way to easily
manage IPv6-over-IPv4 configured tunnels between an ISP and a
customer. The configured tunnels work even if the IPv4 addresses
change dynamically, or are private addresses; the procedure provides
at least a /64 prefix per customer and requires no administrative
set-up. A simple form of NAT traversal is also supported.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Problem Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1 Non-problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Overview of the Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Customer-side Procedures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.1 Possible Prior Agreement with the ISP . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.2 Learning and Configuring the Tunnel Endpoint . . . . . . . . . 6
4.3 Tunnel Activation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.4 Providing Connectivity to Other Nodes . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. ISP-side Procedures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5.1 Possible Prior Agreements with the Customers . . . . . . . . . 8
5.2 Learning the Customers' Tunnel Endpoint Addresses . . . . . . 8
5.3 Prefix Advertisement or Delegation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5.4 Tunnel Activation and Maintenance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5.5 Secure Operations for Tunnel Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5.6 Sufficient Tunnel Service Provisioning . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6. NAT Traversal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
8. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
9. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
A. Comparison to Other Mechanisms and Procedures . . . . . . . . 15
A.1 Configured Tunnels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
A.2 L2TP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
A.3 Tunnel Broker Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
A.4 ISATAP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
B. Multiple Users Behind a NATted IPv4 Address . . . . . . . . . 16
Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . . 17
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1. Introduction
A need for a simple mechanism to set up IPv6-over-IPv4 configured
tunnels between a customer and the ISP seems to have been
demonstrated in 3GPP analysis [17] as well as Unmanaged [18] and ISP
analysis [19]. Most currently proposed mechanisms (like 6to4 [7] or
ISATAP [8]) appear to be unnecessarily complex or otherwise
problematic in these particular scenarios.
ISPs that already have access infrastructure (L2TP Access
Concentrator (LAC), L2TP Network Servers (LNS), PPP Termination
Aggregators (PTA). etc.), IPv6/PPP/L2TP/UDP/IP could be readily
provided using L2TP [9] and IPv6 over PPP [10] as long as the
customer operating systems also support these mechanisms. This
approach, however, is not suitable for 3GPP and Enterprise
environments. See Appendix A for a more detailed comparison.
This memo documents a set of operational procedures which require no
additional protocol specification to provide a very simple and
suitably elegant solution to these problems.
One observation made prior to designing the procedure was that a
signalling protocol is not really needed if the existing mechanisms
for e.g., optional prefix delegation are used, and the ISP can
authenticate the user otherwise; this simplifies the procedure
significantly.
The second section gives a brief problem statement which also
describes the applicability of the solution. The third section
explains the overview of the procedure. The fourth and the fifth
sections describe the customer- and ISP-side procedures in more
detail. The sixth section describes issues related to a simple form
of NAT traversal, and specifies how to optionally encapsulate
IPv6-over-IPv4 packets over UDP.
In appendix A, we compare the mechanism to several other proposed
mechanisms and techniques: pure configured tunnels, the use of Layer
2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP [9]), use of 6to4 [7], an instance of
Tunnel Broker concept -- TSP [11], ISATAP [8], and Teredo [12].
2. Problem Statement
There are ISPs which are willing to provide IPv6 connectivity to
their customers, but may not be able to do it natively due to a
number of reasons. Such ISPs want to find a method to help in
providing IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnels to the customers, with the following
characteristics:
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o The IPv4 address of the customer may be either static or dynamic,
and may be a private address [6] as well, if the customer chooses
to NAT the (public) IP address given by the ISP.
o The ISP may want to offer the tunnel service either requiring
prior agreement with the user, or to every customer who wishes to
try it.
o The customer may have one or more nodes which should obtain IPv6
connectivity.
o The configured tunnel may be set up either from the customer's
gateway, or if the gateway does not support IPv6, from a node
inside the customer's network, when NAT traversal is used. No
more than one node behind a NAT'ed public IPv4 address needs to
participate in the IPv4-in-IPv6 tunnel service (but many more can
use the IPv6 service, of course).
o The solution should be as simple as possible, requiring no new
protocols or substantial modifications to IPv6 or IPv4
implementations either at the ISP or customer side.
2.1 Non-problems
The problem statement explicitly excludes:
o Support for third party ISPs: the methods described here work to
an extent with a lower amount of security even if the ISP
providing the service is not the user's own ISP. Typically, the
third party ISP would have to be able to authenticate the user
somehow; this could be done using a static IPv4 address (rather
insecure), IPsec Security Association, or an unspecified
mechanism. However, third party ISPs are not considered an
important scenario for the IPv6 deployment, and are considered out
of scope.
o More complex forms of NAT traversal: the case where the tunnel
endpoint is visible (from the ISP point of view) behind a public
IPv4 address, and no other tunnel endpoints are using that address
is in scope. However, the case where multiple nodes would want to
initiate a tunnel from behind a "big" NAT, which maps them all to
a single address, is defined out of scope. The customer which has
multiple nodes can still use IPv6 behind such a NAT by selecting
one of the nodes to provide IPv6 access through the tunnel, and
have IPv6 connectivity routed or proxied as normal by the tunnel
endpoint node. The case where the ISP has deployed a single "big"
NAT affecting many customers can be addressed by the ISP deploying
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the tunnel router inside the privately addressed infrastructure
(remember that third party ISPs were out-of-scope as well), so
that no NAT traversal is needed in the first place, as the
connectivity to the ISP's tunnel router is native IPv6 or a
configured tunnel with a static public IPv4 address.
o Short-cut paths between the users (e.g, like 6to4 [7] or ISATAP
[8]): all the IPv6-over-IPv4 traffic flows through the tunnel
router; short-cut mechanisms are believed to be non-essential in
this environment of "short" tunnels, and add to complexity and
security risks. If the load on the tunnel router rises too high,
one could switch to offering native service instead, or deploying
additional tunnel routers.
3. Overview of the Procedure
Throughout this memo, two major operational modes, "managed" and
"ad-hoc" are described. It's expected that some ISPs would like to
use one, and some the other, and both approaches are described.
The procedure can be summarized as follows:
1. If the ISP requires prior agreement ("managed mode"), the
customer contacts the ISP off-band and registers as an IPv6 user.
2. The customer discovers (using one of a number of mechanisms) the
IPv4 tunnel end-point address of the ISP, and creates a
configured tunnel (encapsulating in either IP (protocol 41)
tunnel [1] or UDP (Section 6)) to the address, and sends a normal
Neighbor Discovery [2] (ND) Route Solicitation (RS) or a DHCPv6
[4] SOLICIT or prefix delegation request [5] message over the
tunnel.
3. The ISP's tunnel router sets up a configured tunnel towards the
customer's IPv4 address; the address may be obtained using a
number of mechanisms, or created ad-hoc ("ad-hoc mode") when
tunnel packets arrive. In the managed more, the tunnel interface
is typically pre-configured prior to receiving any packets from
the customer.
4. The ISP's tunnel router sends a normal ND Route Advertisement
(RA) or a further DHCPv6 message over the tunnel to the customer;
the prefix advertised is obtained using one of a number of
mechanisms. The customer automatically configures the prefix and
the addresses and uses them normally.
Note that the description includes DHCPv6, prefix delegation etc.
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just for completeness. It is assumed than in most cases a simple ND
RS/RA exchange will suffice. However, as the procedure is agnostic
of the prefix assignment methods used, any other mechanism can be
used as well.
No new protocols are needed. Both in the managed and ad-hoc modes,
the customer can learn the tunnel address off-band.
In the managed mode, the ISP has to know the IPv4 address assigned to
the customer, configure a new IPv6 tunnel interface for the customer,
and reserve the IPv6 prefix that will be assigned; these have to be
configured on the tunnel router using operator-specific management
techniques (e.g, RADIUS).
In the ad-hoc mode, on the other hand, the tunnel router has to
implement a simple mechanism to allocate a new configured tunnel,
after successful validation (or authentication) procedures as
discussed in Section 5.5, for tunnel packets received from different
customers, and algorithmically derive an IPv6 prefix to be assigned
to the customer.
4. Customer-side Procedures
4.1 Possible Prior Agreement with the ISP
The ISP may require prior agreement or notification before a customer
is allowed to use their tunnel service. In that case, the customer
must contact the ISP using off-band mechanisms. Even if not
required, special requirements (e.g., a static IPv6 prefix when IPv4
address is dynamic, or a need for an IPv6 /48 prefix) may be easier
to fulfill if the user has contacted the ISP beforehand and the ISP
has made arrangements; only a /64 prefix (which will be dynamic if
the IPv4 address is dynamic) will be available in ad-hoc mode.
4.2 Learning and Configuring the Tunnel Endpoint
To get started, the customer has to learn the IPv4 address of the
ISP's tunnel router somehow. Possibilities include, for example:
o Using off-band mechanisms, e.g., from the ISP's web page.
o Using DNS to look up a service name by appending it to the DNS
search path provided by DHCPv4 (e.g.
"tunnel-service.example.com").
o Using a (yet unspecified) DHCPv4 option.
o Using a pre-configured or pre-determined IPv4 anycast address,
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whether in the private or public space; however, note the
considerations about embedding addresses in the nodes [14].
o Using other, unspecified methods.
This memo does not (at least yet) take a stance on the selection of
the mechanism even though some are more problematic than others, but
it is assumed that the first or the second option should be enough
for everyone considering that the customer's own ISP is providing
IPv6 service.
Once the IPv4 address has been learned, it is configured as the
tunnel end-point for the configured IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnel. Unless
the user has a private IPv4 address, implying being behind a NAT, IP
encapsulation must be used; otherwise, the encapsulation can be
selected as described in Section 6. Note that this configuration can
even be done transparently to the user, with very little or no
configuration.
4.3 Tunnel Activation
Next, IPv6 is activated over the tunnel as normal; this could be done
either by a Neighbor Discovery RS, DHCPv6 Solicitation message,
DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation request message, or by simple manual
configuration (note: manual configuration does not work in the
"ad-hoc" operation, because there is no trigger to bring up the ISP's
interface).
The tunnel router responds to this query as normal by sending a Route
Advertisement or continuing with DHCP message exchanges.
4.4 Providing Connectivity to Other Nodes
If the customer has multiple nodes, they can each obtain their own
tunnel in the same manner as long as the nodes are not behind a NAT.
However, this is unoptimal especially if such nodes have internal
communications.
Instead, the customer may want to set up one node to as a Neighbor
Discovery proxy [15] for the /64 route advertisement received, or if
a less specific prefix (e.g., a /48) is being used, as a router for
the internal network(s). This does not need to be any more
complicated than just setting up the tunnel on one node.
5. ISP-side Procedures
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5.1 Possible Prior Agreements with the Customers
The ISP may operate in either or both "managed" and "ad-hoc" modes.
In only the managed mode, a prior agreement with the customer is
needed to allow the customer to use IPv6 using this procedure. In
only the ad-hoc mode, no agreements with the customers are needed. In
both modes, "basic service" (a /64 prefix which will be dynamic if
the customer's IPv4 address is dynamic) can be offered, but more
advanced services (e.g., prefix delegation or a static prefix) are
offered to those with a prior agreement.
ISPs which operate in the managed mode must configure (e.g., manually
or using a script or configuration tool) the configured tunnels on
the tunnel router; also, they may want to create a link between the
stable customer identification and their IPv6 properties (e.g., a
prefix) especially if the IPv4 address is dynamic, to maintain the
stability of IPv6 properties even when the IPv4 address may change.
5.2 Learning the Customers' Tunnel Endpoint Addresses
The ISP must somehow obtain the tunnel endpoint address to be
configured for a configured tunnel. Every active customer has its
own configured tunnel interface on the tunnel router.
When operating in the managed mode, this could be done from e.g.
DHCPv4 leases, RADIUS or Diameter databases, other databases or some
other means. This information will be used to update the tunnel
end-point address on the configured tunnel interface when changing or
as appropriate; the updates can be done e.g. using management tools,
scripting, etc. -- because a change of IPv4 address must be reflected
without delay to the tunnel end-point address, this configuration
update should be immediately triggered by changes in the used
database or lease.
When operating in the ad-hoc mode, the tunnel server should create a
new configured tunnel interface for each IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnel with a
different IPv4 source address. The ISP should be aware of a
potential for a resource exhaustion if the number of customers rises
too high, but actual DoS attacks are not possible if the ISP has
secured its network as described in Section 5.5. Automatic creation
of configured tunnel interfaces requires only rather trivial
implementation [XXX: does this need elaboration?]. Performing
"garbage collection" on such tunnels, e.g. in a Least-Recently-Used
(LRU) manner may be called for if the number of tunnels rises too
high. However, this should only be done after sufficiently long
period has passed, as not to disturb the existing (but maybe dormant)
IPv6 connections over the tunnels.
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If the ISP wants to support NAT traversal when protocol 41 forwarding
[16] is not implemented in all the NAT boxes used by the customers,
the ISP must also provide the support for UDP decapsulation at UDP
port TBD. The users should default to use protocol 41, but if the
initiating packet is encapsulated in UDP, the configured tunnel type
may be changed if supported. NAT traversal is further discussed in
Section 6.
5.3 Prefix Advertisement or Delegation
Each customer should be provided with at least a /64 prefix; this is
both practical (because /64 is required by Stateless Address
Autoconfiguration [3]), and architecturally correct (providing the
possibility to connect more than one node without an IPv6 NAT).
In the managed mode, the ISP may advertise a static or dynamic IPv6
/64 prefix using RAs, provide a prefix delegation, or something else
(e.g., manual configuration if the IPv4 address is static).
In the ad-hoc mode, the ISP must ensure that a sufficiently large
pool of /64 prefixes are available. The prefixes can be allocated
either in a sequential fashion and advertised in RA's, or
automatically calculated, with some assumptions, from the used IPv4
addresses. For example, if the ISP uses IPv4 network 10.0.0.0/8 for
its customers, it needs 24 bits to uniquely identify each customer --
this calls for assigning an IPv6 /40 prefix to be used for
advertising /64's; in this example, a customer with address
"10.1.2.3" might get advertised an IPv6 prefix "2001:db8:FF01:0203::/
64", where "01:0203" corresponds to the client address and
"2001:db8:FF00::" the /40 allocated to the ad-hoc tunneling
operations by the ISP. Mapping the most interesting bits (for the
ISP) of an IPv4 address to the IPv6 prefix allows even large ISPs to
easily give each user an algorithmically derived IPv6 prefix.
5.4 Tunnel Activation and Maintenance
When the router receives e.g. ND RS, DHCPv6 SOLICIT or prefix
delegation request from the configured tunnel, it responds normally,
as on any other interface. (When in ad-hoc mode, setting up the
tunnel from the received IPv6-over-IPv4 packet may take a while, but
the processing continues when set up.)
The ISP should avoid sending periodic messages (e.g., unsolicited
route advertisements) to the tunnel, or decrease the interval used
for sending them: if the customer disconnects for some time, and
someone else gets the same address, it might be disturbing to the
new, potentially non-IPv6 aware customer to receive "weird" protocol
41 or UDP packets meant to the previous customer. The similar effect
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occurs if someone in the Internet is trying to communicate with an
IPv6 user, but the user has changed its address in the meantime, and
packets may go to someone else's IPv4 address. However, this is no
different to the situation with IPv4 today, except that the packets
may be discarded by the operating system and never even be noticed;
but if they are noticed, e.g., by a personal firewall, they may not
be recognized and may cause more alarm.
5.5 Secure Operations for Tunnel Service
The ISP should perform IPv4 ingress filtering at its borders towards
peers and upstreams, by disallowing packets with the source addresses
belonging to its own site or its customers. In particular, the ISP
must block the tunnel router's address from being used as a source
address from the outside; blocking the use of the customer prefixes
would be preferred as well.
The ISP must perform IPv4 ingress filtering towards the customers, in
particular those that use the tunnel service, so that they will not
be able to forge the IPv4 source address of the packets. In
particular, they must not be able to spoof the address of the tunnel
router to the other customers.
Both of these are very simple operations especially in the minimal
case of blocking only the abuse of the tunnel router address.
Naturally, the ISP should perform IPv6 ingress filtering as well, but
that is orthogonal to the security of this procedure.
In addition, the ISP must ensure, especially if in ad-hoc mode, that
only a selected subset of source addresses is able to communicate
with the tunnel router's designated tunnel address. For example,
creating dynamic interfaces with packets from outside of the ISP's
network could easily be used in a resource exhaustion attack. In
addition, to curtail internal resource exhaustion attacks, it makes
very much sense to ingress filter all the customers which are allowed
to use the ad-hoc tunnel service. With these precautions, resources
may only be exhausted by a real resource starvation, not through an
attack; on the other hand, if the ISP does not bother to add such
checks, it only harms itself for being susceptible to various forms
of attacks!
5.6 Sufficient Tunnel Service Provisioning
The ISP must naturally ensure that the tunnel router is capable to
handle the amount of users and the traffic that goes through it. It
should also be noted that all the traffic between the users of the
ISP go through the same router; "shortcuts" routes are not deemed
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necessary. The increases in the latency are not significant as the
tunnel router is deployed close to the IPv4 access router (or even
co-located with it) topology-wise.
Typically, these are not believed to be problems. If the number of
users or the amount of traffic generated increases, starting
deploying native IPv6 access instead eliminates the problem, or the
ISP could deploy more tunnel routers in a load-balancing
configuration -- depending on the mechanism used to find the tunnel
service, this could be e.g., through DNS load-balancing, anycasting
the tunnel service address, etc.
6. NAT Traversal
NAT traversal may be desirable especially in the case when the
customer gets one IPv4 address from the ISP, which is assigned on the
IPv4 gateway, and NAT'ed access is provided to the customer's nodes.
If the gateway cannot be IPv6-enabled, the customer may want to
obtain the access from an internal node to bypass the gateway and the
NAT.
There are two ways to do this: (1) ensuring that the NAT forwards
protocol 41 packets [16], or (2) providing a minimal UDP
encapsulation to the tunnel packets.
Forwarding protocol 41 packets is simple if implemented by the NAT
gateway; this requires no administrative set-up. This works
(basically) for one node behind the NAT at the time -- however,
multiple nodes behind a single public IPv4 address was considered out
of scope.
If protocol 41 packets are not forwarded, a minimal UDP encapsulation
may be needed: instead of using protocol 41, UDP is used with the
minimal headers. This adds 8 bytes to the packets, and should be
taken into consideration with configured tunnel MTU calculations [1].
The routers should use a UDP port TBD by default to de-multiplex UDP
configured tunnels. The tunnels are identified in SNMP by udp(8)
IANAtunnelType [20].
The customer using private addresses behind a NAT must select which
method to use. It is recommended to try protocol 41 first; if no
response is received, UDP encapsulation may be tried instead. Note
that this choice of the encapsulation may be completely transparent
to the user as well.
With UDP encapsulation, the algorithmically derived prefix assignment
is kept simple with the assumption that every tunnel service user can
be identified with a public IPv4 address; whether the tunnel
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originates inside a NAT does not matter. That way, for
UDP-encapsulated configured tunnels, the tunnel router only
additionally needs to keep a record of the source UDP port each
customer uses.
However, NAT mappings must be maintained whether UDP or protocol 41
is being used. It is recommended to do this by the customer
activating ND Neighbor Unreachability Detection (NUD) on the
configured tunnel; the default value for DELAY_FIRST_PROBE_TIME is 5
seconds [2]; this is enough, and could even be increased to e.g., 60
seconds for this link type. Increasing it further may have adverse
effects as the NAT UDP/proto-41 mapping lifetimes typically vary from
60..200 seconds. No protocol is proposed to discover and use the
most optimal lifetimes for the particular NAT; this is not believed
to be worth the robustness losses.
7. Acknowledgements
This procedure was inspired by a need to severely simplify ISATAP
[8]. Suresh Satapati coined up the name, and provided useful
feedback. Gert Doering, Marc Blanchet and Janos Mohacsi participated
in the discussion clarifying the applicability.
8. IANA Considerations
This memo requests an allocation of a "privileged" UDP port (TBD).
9. Security Considerations
The requirements for reasonably secure operations within an ISP are
described in Section 5.5; with these in place, it is difficult to
imagine a case where stronger mechanisms such as IPsec for
IPv6-over-IPv4 tunnels would be needed.
A particular case occurs when an IPv4 address of the user changes,
and the user's IPv6 prefix changes as well; this may be allocated to
a different IPv6 user. However, this is no different than IPv4
address re-use threats. [XXX: can be considered more if really
needed.]
When the ISP operates in the ad-hoc mode, and there is an event where
all the IPv4 addresses change simultaneously, there may be a large
number of simultaneous updates to update the tunnel point addresses
in the tunnel router. This situation should be taken into
consideration e.g. if renumbering.
The case where a third party ISP provides the service was decreed out
of scope, because it is impractical and economically unfeasible, and
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has a number of security problems as well. Similarly, multiple users
behind a single NAT'ted public IPv4 address seems to be only relevant
in the third party case and is equally out of scope; this would have
security implications as well, as it would be relatively easy to
hijack someone else's IPv6 prefix.
Normative References
[1] Nordmark, E. and R. Gilligan, "Basic Transition Mechanisms for
IPv6 Hosts and Routers", draft-ietf-v6ops-mech-v2-01 (work in
progress), October 2003.
[2] Narten, T., Nordmark, E. and W. Simpson, "Neighbor Discovery for
IP Version 6 (IPv6)", RFC 2461, December 1998.
[3] Thomson, S. and T. Narten, "IPv6 Stateless Address
Autoconfiguration", RFC 2462, December 1998.
[4] Droms, R., Bound, J., Volz, B., Lemon, T., Perkins, C. and M.
Carney, "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6 (DHCPv6)",
RFC 3315, July 2003.
[5] Troan, O. and R. Droms, "IPv6 Prefix Options for Dynamic Host
Configuration Protocol (DHCP) version 6", RFC 3633, December
2003.
Informative References
[6] Rekhter, Y., Moskowitz, R., Karrenberg, D., Groot, G. and E.
Lear, "Address Allocation for Private Internets", BCP 5, RFC
1918, February 1996.
[7] Carpenter, B. and K. Moore, "Connection of IPv6 Domains via
IPv4 Clouds", RFC 3056, February 2001.
[8] Templin, F., Gleeson, T., Talwar, M. and D. Thaler, "Intra-Site
Automatic Tunnel Addressing Protocol (ISATAP)",
draft-ietf-ngtrans-isatap-17 (work in progress), January 2004.
[9] Townsley, W., Valencia, A., Rubens, A., Pall, G., Zorn, G. and
B. Palter, "Layer Two Tunneling Protocol "L2TP"", RFC 2661,
August 1999.
[10] Haskin, D. and E. Allen, "IP Version 6 over PPP", RFC 2472,
December 1998.
[11] Blanchet, M., "Tunnel Setup Protocol (TSP)A Control Protocol to
Setup IPv6 or IPv4 Tunnels", draft-vg-ngtrans-tsp-01 (work in
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progress), July 2002.
[12] Huitema, C., "Teredo: Tunneling IPv6 over UDP through NATs",
draft-huitema-v6ops-teredo-00 (work in progress), June 2003.
[13] Massar, J., "SixXS Heartbeat Protocol",
draft-massar-v6ops-heartbeat-00 (work in progress), January
2004.
[14] Plonka, D., "Embedding Globally Routable Internet Addresses
Considered Harmful", draft-ietf-grow-embed-addr-00 (work in
progress), December 2003.
[15] Thaler, D. and M. Talwar, "Bridge-like Neighbor Discovery
Proxies (ND Proxy)", draft-thaler-ipv6-ndproxy-01 (work in
progress), October 2003.
[16] Palet, J., "Forwarding Protocol 41 in NAT Boxes",
draft-palet-v6ops-proto41-nat-03 (work in progress), October
2003.
[17] Wiljakka, J., "Analysis on IPv6 Transition in 3GPP Networks",
draft-ietf-v6ops-3gpp-analysis-07 (work in progress), October
2003.
[18] Huitema, C., "Evaluation of Transition Mechanisms for Unmanaged
Networks", draft-ietf-v6ops-unmaneval-00 (work in progress),
June 2003.
[19] Lind, M., "Scenarios and Analysis for Introducing IPv6 into ISP
Networks", draft-ietf-v6ops-isp-scenarios-analysis-00 (work in
progress), December 2003.
[20] Thaler, D., "IP Tunnel MIB", draft-thaler-inet-tunnel-mib-00
(work in progress), October 2003.
Author's Address
Pekka Savola
CSC/FUNET
Espoo
Finland
EMail: psavola@funet.fi
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Appendix A. Comparison to Other Mechanisms and Procedures
This mechanism can be compared to several other proposed mechanisms
and proposals: pure configured tunnels, the use of Layer 2 Tunneling
Protocol (L2TP [9]), use of 6to4 [7], an instance of Tunnel Broker
concept -- TSP [11], ISATAP [8], and Teredo [12].
Since obtaining IPv6 connectivity without the support of your own ISP
is out-of-scope, we exclude 6to4 and Teredo from the comparison.
Now's let's take a look at the rest.
A.1 Configured Tunnels
Configured tunnels are preferable in every case where they can be
used. However, it's difficult to manage them especially in the cases
where dynamic (but public) IPv4 addresses are being used, when the
user needs IPv6 connectivity to nodes behind the user's own NAT
gateway (which doesn't implement protocol-41 forwarding), or when the
amount of configuration must be kept to the minimum.
A.2 L2TP
L2TP could be leveraged by using UDP (passes NATs) to encapsulate PPP
frames toward the customers. The customers would have to have an
L2TP client and IPv6-capable PPP, and the ISP would have to have an
L2TP server, a management system for the IPv6 attributes (e.g.,
RADIUS), and a configured address pool. Additionally, as IPV6CP PPP
negotiation does not allow prefix delegation, DNS resolver
configuration, etc., one might have to run (especially if more than
one address is required) an additional protocol, e.g. DHCPv6 for
prefix delegation, on the link.
The ISPs which already have L2TP, PPP and RADIUS infrastructures
(e.g., for dial-up IPv6 users, or certain classes of xDSL users), the
additional set-up complexity would not be high; for those which do
not, this would be a rather complicated set of operations. Naturally,
the customer operating systems would have to support L2TP and PPP as
well.
L2TP clearly has its strenghts, but some ISPs might see it as too
complicated to set up. Also, if the ISP wishes to offer an "ad-hoc"
operations (as seems to be the case in 3GPP at least), the amount of
infrastructure required might be too high.
A.3 Tunnel Broker Solutions
A large number of custom tunnel brokering solutions have been used.
For example, many (open-source) VPN products offer the capabilities
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of providing IPv6 service through the VPN. Multiple tunnel brokers
have also been deployed, e.g. by SixXS [13], Viagenie, and others.
We'll look at Tunnel Setup Protocol (TSP) as an instance of this
model.
TSP provides a similar set of functions as STEP. However, TSP has an
overhead of a signalling protocol, which is not needed in STEP. TSP
offers a custom way of prefix delegation, while STEP relies on
standard mechanisms like DHCPv6 Prefix Delegation, or the use of ND
proxying. TSP works also for tunnel configuration across ISPs, which
was out of scope for STEP. STEP is transparent to the user, but TSP
requires a client software and some form of set-up.
A.4 ISATAP
ISATAP provides many features, like automatic tunneling between
ISATAP nodes in the same ISATAP site, which was decreed insecure and
out of scope for STEP. The insecurity rises from the applying ISATAP
in scenarios where the bounds of an ISATAP site are larger than the
bounds of an administrative domain, leading to e.g., issues with the
trust of the pseudo-interface when a packet with Hop Limit=255 and a
link-local address is received. STEP has no such assumptions, and
it's security properties are about the same as using bidirectional
configured tunnels.
Appendix B. Multiple Users Behind a NATted IPv4 Address
The scenario where multiple users are behind a single NAT'ed IPv4
address (e.g., when using a third party ISP) was decreed out of
scope. However, the possibility to achieve that is shown, even though
it is not considered to be useful.
Providing service to multiple users would require nothing more than a
change in the algorithm used to derive the customer's prefix. Of
course, at first glance this appears to be problematic, as mapping 16
additional bits to the IPv6 address may seem like a challenge.
However, this is not the case; such support is only needed for
(out-of-scope) third party ISP case, which must operate in the
managed mode, and the prefix assignment cannot be done based on the
address anyway, so there is no real problem with this approach.
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