Hello Kathleen,

Thanks for your review of draft-ietf-nvo3-geneve-13.  We could provide 
additional clarification in section 4.3 to address your comment. Please let us 
know if this satisfies your comment.

Current text in Section 4.3, first paragraph:

   In order to provide integrity of Geneve headers, options and payload,

   for example to avoid mis-delivery of payload to different tenant

   systems in case of data corruption, outer UDP checksum SHOULD be used

   with Geneve when transported over IPv4.  An operator MAY choose to

   disable UDP checksum and use zero checksum if Geneve packet integrity

   is provided by other data integrity mechanisms such as IPsec or

   additional checksums or if one of the conditions in Section 
4.3.1<https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-nvo3-geneve-13#section-4.3.1> a,

   b, c are met.

Proposed text to 4.3 that we believe would address your comments:


   In order to provide integrity of Geneve headers, options and payload,

   for example to avoid mis-delivery of payload to different tenant

   systems in case of data corruption, outer UDP checksum SHOULD be used

   with Geneve when transported over IPv4. "The UDP checksum provides a 
statistical guarantee that a payload was not corrupted in transit. These 
integrity checks are not strong from a coding or cryptographic perspective and 
are not designed to detect physical-layer errors or malicious modification of 
the datagram (see RFC 8085 section 3.4). In deployments where such a risk 
exists, an operator SHOULD use additional data integrity mechanisms such as 
offered by IPSec (see Section 6.2)."



   An operator MAY choose to

   disable UDP checksum and use zero checksum if Geneve packet integrity

   is provided by other data integrity mechanisms such as IPsec or

   additional checksums or if one of the conditions in Section 
4.3.1<https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-nvo3-geneve-13#section-4.3.1> a,

   b, c are met.

Thanks,
Ilango


From: nvo3 [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kathleen Moriarty
Sent: Tuesday, July 2, 2019 12:43 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [nvo3] Review of draft-ietf-nvo3-geneve-13

Hello,

I just read through draft-ietf-nvo3-geneve, sorry I am out-of-cycle in the 
review process, but it looks like it has not started IETF last call yet.  I 
have what's really just a nit and request for a little more text.

Section 4.3.1

The value of the UDP checksum is overstated.  The text should note that 
corruption is still possible as this is a checksum and not a hash with low 
collision rates.  Corruption happens and goes undetected in normal operations 
today.

The security considerations section does address the recommendation to use 
IPsec, but making the connection on the UDP checksum being inadequate could be 
helpful.

Reality:

The way this is written, I suspect there really are no plans to use IPsec with 
GENEVE, are there?  The MUST statements around not altering traffic can only be 
achieved with IPsec, so if the intent is really to enforce the early MUST 
statements in the document, sooner mention of IPsec would be good.  If this is 
more for detecting corruption (and not having that be 100% or close) that 
should be clear up front.

I'm just envisioning use cases where the virtual path is set differently to the 
physical path for expected operations to route through desired security 
functions, then an attacker alters checksums to avoid detection of these 
changes.

Thanks and sorry for a late review!

--

Best regards,
Kathleen
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