Inline...

On 6 May 2014 19:16, Anoop Ghanwani <[email protected]> wrote:
>> There's not a lot of discussion about the costs of maintaining an
>> exception list for rebalanced flows.  A hash-based distribution is
>> going to cost essentially zero state because the outbound path can be
>> determined on a per-packet basis, but as soon as you start
>> redistributing, there is an added state cost (and potential increase
>> in lookup times).  That probably needs some discussion.
>>
>
> We could probably add another subsection to Section 6 which discusses
> operational considerations.  Would the following address this concern?
>
> 6.3 Forwarding Resources
>
> Hash-based techniques used for load balancing with LAG/ECMP
> are usually stateless.  The mechanisms described in this document
> require additional resources in the forwarding plane of routers for creating
> PBR rules that are capable of overriding the forwarding decision from
> the hash-based approach.  These resources may limit the number of
> flows that can be rebalanced and may also impact the latency experienced
> by packets due to the additional lookups that are required.

Yep, that's perfect.

>> This plays into the security considerations, which I think need to
>> highlight this as a potential DoS vector.  Implementing automatic
>> redistribution on top of a hash-based stateless distribution is
>> vulnerable to attack if the hash function used is predictable.
>>
>
> Can you say something more about this attack?  Is it that an attacker
> would send large flows that map to the same link in order to consume
> resources in the PBR table?

That's exactly the concern.  Similar concerns arise in hash tables
that are predictable.  If an attacker wants to mount a DoS attack, one
vector they have open to them is to overload a single bucket, forcing
lookup times to increase from O(1) to O(N).  There's some research on
the matter, http://cr.yp.to/papers/surf.pdf for example.

> Yes, we have had issues with this when converting from Word and
> keep forgetting to adjust the .txt before submitting.

It's probably too late for this, but you might find this useful in
future: https://github.com/cabo/kramdown-rfc2629 (see it in action
here: https://github.com/tlswg/tls13-spec)

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