[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: old GSE idea



Going back through some old unanswered (sorry 'bout that) email...

On Thursday, April 17, 2003, at 04:59  AM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
I think the simplest solution is to make the lower 64 bits globally unique.
This breaks autoconfiguration.
MAC address collisions are not uncommon.
...
The problem is that on a LAN, you can do DAD, but doing that world wide each time you connect to the network is no fun.
Understood. Seems to me this is one of the tradeoffs. Globally unique identifiers in the lower 64 bits allows for a very simple mapping mechanism to map that identifier into one or more locators giving you both site and host multi- and re-homing. If you cannot guarantee global uniqueness of those identifiers, then to get the same functionality, you increase the complexity of the mapping mechanism.

Why put location back into identity? In my view, endpoint identifiers are 'names'. They are a flat, undifferentiated (from the network perspective, administratively, you may want some hierarchy) identifier space.
This is going to be a problem if you want to look these up in a distributed database. We really need a hierarchy for something like this.
I do not disagree that you want hierarchy. What I am saying is that you do not want is to tie that hierarchy into network topology such that if the object changes its location in the network topology, you must change the identifier. You want an administrative hierarchy disjoint from network topology.

Assuming you are asking about the multi-homed destination case,the naive approach would be to have the source core/edge boundary forwarder notice the link is down via 'traditional' methods (BGP re-convergence, ICMP network unreachable, whatever)
Obviously this stuff isn't going to be in BGP.  :-)
Yes it can. A locator, if we want them to scale, is part of an aggregate. If an aggregate is withdrawn, a boundary forwarder listening (but not contributing) to a BGP feed could then choose an alternate locator.

A large percentage of network problems don't generate unreachables.
For those problems a router doesn't notice, you pretty much lose, regardless of approach taken, unless you add the complexity of pseudo-connection management or somesuch.

For those problems a router does notice, it should back send unreachables.

If an attacker gets to reroute your traffic, then they presumably also get to route in into oblivion. So IPsec doesn't solve problems in the routing system.
Right. Placing control of a router in the hands of an attacker is generally a bad idea.

This helps but doesn't really solve the problem of dead layer 2 networks where the IP-speaking boxes at both ends don't see there is something wrong.
There are many Byzantine failure modes that are difficult to create solutions for. I'm of the opinion (actually more than that, I believe we have empirical evidence) that if we try to solve all the problems we'll get nowhere.

What I mean is that you need to implement GSE on both ends before it will do you any good.
Yes. This is, I believe, a fundamental issue that is caused by the layering violations created by letting applications (et al) know address bit structures. As far as I can tell, there are exactly two solutions to this:

1) NAT, which doesn't need to be at both ends
2) map on transmit, remap back to original on receive, which needs to be on both ends.

I'd be ecstatic to hear of alternative solutions.

I think hooks forward are possible by not hardcoding the exact 83 bits we look at into the modified stacks but by making this more generic so we can support 160 bits or 64 bits out of 128 or whatever at some later date.
Yet more complexity.

I'm not saying we should implement huge steps, but it would be good if the small steps we implement get us closer to a long term goal.
We have been struggling with this issue for about a decade. I think it is past time to start with a simple solution instead of trying to find the generic, infinitely extensible, end-all be-all solution.

Rgds,
-drc