Security at the Attribute-Value Pair (AVP) Level for Non-neighboring Diameter Nodes: Scenarios and Requirements
RFC 7966
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) H. Tschofenig
Request for Comments: 7966
Category: Informational J. Korhonen, Ed.
ISSN: 2070-1721 Broadcom Limited
G. Zorn
Network Zen
K. Pillay
Internet Solutions
September 2016
Security at the Attribute-Value Pair (AVP) Level for
Non-neighboring Diameter Nodes: Scenarios and Requirements
Abstract
This specification specifies requirements for providing Diameter
security at the level of individual Attribute-Value Pairs (AVPs).
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 7841.
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/rfc7966.
Tschofenig, et al. Informational [Page 1]
RFC 7966 Diameter AVP-Level Security September 2016
Copyright Notice
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Security Threats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Scenarios for Diameter AVP-Level Protection . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Tschofenig, et al. Informational [Page 2]
RFC 7966 Diameter AVP-Level Security September 2016
1. Introduction
The Diameter base protocol specification [2] defines security
protection between neighboring Diameter peers. Diameter mandates
that peer connections must be protected by Transport Layer Security
(TLS) [6] for TCP, by Datagram TLS (DTLS) [7] for the Stream Control
Transmission Protocol (SCTP), or by security mechanisms that are
independent of Diameter (such as IPsec [5]). These security
protocols offer a wide range of security properties, including entity
authentication, data-origin authentication, integrity protection,
confidentiality protection, and replay protection. They also support
a large number of cryptographic algorithms, algorithm negotiation,
and different types of credentials. It should be understood that
TLS/DTLS/IPsec in the Diameter context does not provide end-to-end
security unless the Diameter nodes are direct peers, i.e.,
neighboring Diameter nodes. The current Diameter security is
realized hop by hop.
The need to also offer additional security protection of AVPs between
non-neighboring Diameter nodes was recognized very early in the work
on Diameter. This led to work on Diameter security using the
Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS) [3]. However, due to the lack of
deployment interest at that time (and the complexity of the developed
solution), the specification was never completed.
In the meanwhile, Diameter had received a lot of deployment interest
from the cellular operator community, and because of the
sophistication of those deployments, the need for protecting Diameter
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