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ops-dir feedback on routing protocol abuse
FYI below.
I should have a summary from rtg-dir and a proposed
text of the IESG position by the telechat.
--
Alex
http://www.psg.com/~zinin/
General analysis:
1. BGP is part of the Internet's critical infrastructure,
whose failures would severely affect the operations of
the Internet.
2. Overloading of BGP increases the likelihood of problems
appearing in the original protocol and the Internet
routing system, because of the following potential reasons:
a. Increasing size of the code
b. Increasing complexity of the code
c. Increasing memory and BW requirements
d. Interference between the original BGP code and it's
"applications" due to implementation flaws. At a minimum in
terms of memory usage and CPU utilization, and more direct
if code is reused.)
e. Interference between the Internet BGP routing system and
other BGP-application specific distributed systems
3. It is not clear that the above problems will appear for sure,
however, given the importance of BGP for the Internet, the burden
of proof that they will not should be on the proponents of the
new BGP applications.
Recommendations:
1. Changes made to the Internet-critical protocols such as BGP
should not be taken lightly. The following conditions should
be met before changes are accepted:
a. Reason for a change should be carefully described
and agreed upon. Specifically, if the application
is not obviously routing-related, justification should
be provided as to why a particular routing protocol
is the right choice.
b. Operational impacts should be characterized, with
the analysis of potential failure modes and their
mitigation
c. Changes to the deployment scenarios should be identified
and analyzed to see how protocol characteristics may be
affected
Ideally, changes should not be admitted to the protocol unless
it has been proven that they will do no harm to the existing
Internet infrastructure, as opposed to a lack of proof that
they will do harm.
2. In the particular situation with non-routing application of BGP
as used for VPN membership discovery and L2 VPN signaling, a
careful analysis should be performed to see if BGP protocol
framework is the best fit for the problems that need to be
solved.
3. If the conclusion is that the BGP framework is a good fit for
these problems, the recommendation is to clearly separate
BGP as used today for Internet routing from the BGP framework
used for non-routing functions. This should be done by
instantiating a new protocol, that would inherit the BGP
functions most interesting for introduced functionality, yet
would have its own name, transport protocol ports, and would
explicitly not interoperate with what is known as BGP today.