Auto-Discovery VPN Problem Statement and Requirements
RFC 7018
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) V. Manral
Request for Comments: 7018 HP
Category: Informational S. Hanna
ISSN: 2070-1721 Juniper
September 2013
Auto-Discovery VPN Problem Statement and Requirements
Abstract
This document describes the problem of enabling a large number of
systems to communicate directly using IPsec to protect the traffic
between them. It then expands on the requirements for such a
solution.
Manual configuration of all possible tunnels is too cumbersome in
many such cases. In other cases, the IP addresses of endpoints
change, or the endpoints may be behind NAT gateways, making static
configuration impossible. The Auto-Discovery VPN solution will
address these requirements.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for informational purposes.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has
received public review and has been approved for publication by the
Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents
approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet
Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7018.
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RFC 7018 Auto-Discovery VPN September 2013
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2013 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
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include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................2
1.1. Terminology ................................................3
1.2. Conventions Used in This Document ..........................4
2. Use Cases .......................................................4
2.1. Use Case 1: Endpoint-to-Endpoint VPN .......................4
2.2. Use Case 2: Gateway-to-Gateway VPN .........................5
2.3. Use Case 3: Endpoint-to-Gateway VPN ........................6
3. Inadequacy of Existing Solutions ................................6
3.1. Exhaustive Configuration ...................................6
3.2. Star Topology ..............................................6
3.3. Proprietary Approaches .....................................7
4. Requirements ....................................................7
4.1. Gateway and Endpoint Requirements ..........................7
5. Security Considerations ........................................11
6. Acknowledgements ...............................................11
7. Normative References ...........................................12
1. Introduction
IPsec [RFC4301] is used in several different cases, including
tunnel-mode site-to-site VPNs and remote access VPNs. Both tunneling
modes for IPsec gateways and host-to-host transport mode are
supported in this document.
The subject of this document is the problem presented by large-scale
deployments of IPsec and the requirements on a solution to address
the problem. These may be a large collection of VPN gateways
connecting various sites, a large number of remote endpoints
connecting to a number of gateways or to each other, or a mix of the
two. The gateways and endpoints may belong to a single
administrative domain or several domains with a trust relationship.
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RFC 7018 Auto-Discovery VPN September 2013
Section 4.4 of RFC 4301 describes the major IPsec databases needed
for IPsec processing. It requires extensive configuration for each
tunnel, so manually configuring a system of many gateways and
endpoints becomes infeasible and inflexible.
The difficulty is that a lot of configuration mentioned in RFC 4301
is required to set up a Security Association. The Internet Key
Exchange Protocol (IKE) implementations need to know the identity and
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