Wes,

Thank you very much for this detailed review! We'll take a look at each point 
in detail and try to improve the document as much as possible based on your 
feedback.

Camilo Cardona

-----Original Message-----
From: GROW [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of George, Wes
Sent: viernes, 30 de mayo de 2014 17:25
To: Peter Schoenmaker; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [GROW] WGLC draft-ietf-grow-filtering-threats-02

I think this draft has the potential to be useful, but it needs another 
revision or two after getting some thorough reviews to get it there. I’ve 
hopefully provided one substantive review below, but it needs others.

NITS:
Some directional arrows to indicate the propagation of the routes (from which 
ASN to which ASN) would help your diagrams immensely.

Consistency: you use P and P’ to indicate the more/less specific routes in the 
intro, but then use P/p in the examples. Capital/lowercase is much harder to 
see if you’re reading quickly, especially in a diagram, and with a letter like 
P, the difference between capital and lowercase is somewhat font-dependent, and 
so I’d recommend sticking with P/P'


I echo Bruno’s comments about the nonstandard format for references, as well as 
using RFC5737 documentation addresses instead of using 1918 addresses.
I do note that the examples use a /22 and /24s, while the 5737 prefixes are all 
/24s, but the examples should work equally well using /24 and longer prefixes. 
If not, it appears that the main goal is to demonstrate an 
aggregate/deaggregate relationship, so the authors should also feel free to use 
the IPv6 Documentation Prefix 2001:DB8::/32 and subnet it as necessary. :-) Use 
of RFC5398 documentation ASNs in place of ASN1, 2, 3, 4, etc would also be a 
good idea.

ID nits also notes the fact that it’s missing an IANA considerations and 
Security considerations section.

Substantial comments:
Regarding the missing security considerations section: there’s a significant 
discussion needed about the use of these methods to redirect traffic 
maliciously. It’s somewhat related to the route leaks draft, and the general 
idea of securing the routing infrastructure, but this is sort of the reverse of 
a route leak, and to my knowledge, there are really no existing or proposed 
tools to protect against that sort of behavior since filtering policy is mostly 
of local significance.

Structurally, I found this document pretty hard to follow. I think it would be 
much easier to read if it discussed motivations first, either at the beginning 
of section 2, or if the motivations are significantly different for local vs 
remote filtering, at the beginning of section 2.1 and 2.2. This way the draft 
would discuss why a given prefix might be locally or remotely filtered, and 
THEN discuss the example of HOW. The introductory text seems to imply that this 
is what the document will do, but the motivations are buried at the end of the 
sections, and even then, you only obliquely and briefly discuss them. I see 
that your current motivations reference traffic management/engineering and 
policy enforcement (minimum prefix length), but I didn’t see a reference to the 
other big one: Routing hardware scaling limitations.

It may also be useful to put the relevant parts of section 3 immediately 
following each discussion of filtering, i.e.
Local filtering motivation/example
Unexpected traffic flows triggered by local filtering Remote filtering 
motivation/example Unexpected traffic flows triggered by remote filtering

I think you should remove most of section 3.1 and figure 4. It’s not a useful 
precursor to the later examples and repeats a mistake made several places in 
this draft (such as the beginning of section 4), which is that it starts with a 
really generic and hand-wavey intro that almost reads like an abstract for each 
section, telling the reader that the draft will be talking about something in 
more detail in a subsequent section. Let’s compress things a little and get 
right to the meat of the draft. This draft's individual sections aren't long 
enough to need tl;dr summaries at the beginning of each section, and IMO the 
examples in the other parts of section 3 stand on their own without the one in 
3.1.

Section 4 has very little actual guidance on how to detect these incidents, 
especially in 4.2, which mainly re-summarizes the points made elsewhere about 
WHY an SP might do this. This section should be discussing the tools available 
to see these things in addition to generally sketching what data to look at. 
For example, *how* would an SP "monitor its traffic data and validate if any 
flow
   entering the ISP network through a non-customer link is forwarded to a 
non-customer next-hop”? The second paragraph of section 4.1 is good, as it 
discusses the BGP data analysis necessary, but would be better if it identified 
one or more tools that allow for that sort of analysis, and identified 
scenarios (if any) where these tools or the available data would be inadequate.
I would also recommend different wording than “victim”, perhaps in terms of 
originator vs propagator of the routes. It may not actually be useful to 
differentiate between the different types (victim vs contributor) if the 
methods to detect the occurrence of this sort of route filtering is the same 
regardless of where you are in the path of the route’s propagation.

4.1 refers back to 3.1, but I’m not sure what it’s intending the reader to 
recall from that section, since 3.1 did not really discuss what the "different 
situations" were.

In the end of 5.1 - how would an operator "account the amount of traffic that 
has been subject to the unexpected flows”?


5.2.1 - You’d be better off discussing this in terms of why it’s not a viable 
solution instead of discussing it impassively. There are very few scenarios 
outside of DoS attack traffic where blackholing traffic to solve a routing 
problem is warranted, so the language needs to be a good bit stronger so that 
it doesn’t read like a legitimate alternative. In IETF parlance, this is NOT 
RECOMMENDED, or “considered harmful”. I also don’t understand what 5.2.2 is 
trying to say that is distinct from 5.2.1.
There’s no discussion of the automatic part, and seems mainly to be a 
continuation of that previous filtering discussion.

5.2.3 would be more useful if it discussed the proposed solution in more 
detail, especially as regards the referenced paper. Right now the link between 
the two is not clear even after reviewing the presentation.
Section 2.2 also references this solution, but is similarly unclear about how 
it might help. It may be that there is another draft needed to discuss the 
application of this solution to this problem rather than covering it here, but 
either way, simply providing the reference with no additional discussion isn’t 
enough.

It would also be useful to explicitly state in section 5 that there are no 
existing good systematic solutions to this problem, and that the draft is 
discussing *potential* solutions


Thanks,

Wes George



On 5/21/14, 9:34 AM, "Peter Schoenmaker" <[email protected]> wrote:

>hello,
>
>I would like to call a second working group last call on 
>draft-ietf-grow-filtering-threats-02.  we issued a previous one in 
>december but received no comments.  The document is ready to publish, 
>and now is your last time to support or comment.  WGLC will end 6/6/2014.
>
>https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-grow-filtering-threats/
>
>Abstract
>
>   Network operators define their BGP policies based on the business
>   relationships that they maintain with their peers.  By limiting the
>   propagation of BGP prefixes, an autonomous system avoids the
>   existence of flows between BGP peers that do not provide any
>   economical gain.  This draft describes how unexpected traffic flows
>   can emerge in autonomous systems due to the filtering of overlapping
>   BGP prefixes by neighboring domains.
>
>Thanks
>
>peter
>
>
>
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