On Dec 7, 2012, at 2:38 PM, Murphy, Sandra wrote:

> From comments made at the mike in the last IETG sidr session after the 
> discussion of key rollover techniques, I think there might be a bit of 
> confusion about beaconing.
> 
> An Expire Time was a feature of the bgpsec protocol in versions 00-01.  The 
> purpose of the Expire Time  was to prevent replay and ensure freshness.  The 
> effect of this feature was to require periodic readvertisements of all 
> prefixes, hence the name "beaconing".
> 
> Based on wg discussions, "beaconing" was removed from the bgpsec protocol in 
> versions 02 (Mar 12) forward.
> 
> Protection against human time scale replay, e.g., from neighbor relationships 
> that change, was suggested to be possible through the use of key rollover.


I'm pretty sure the captured proceedings for "Discussion of Key Rollover 
Mechanisms for Replay-Attack Protection" [!=beacon?] mentions "beacon" at least 
eleven times.  Additionally, "BGPSEC router key rollover" was about periodic 
updates (aka "beacons") as well.

Folks can name them periodic updates, or beacons, or even stretch and call them 
triggered updates if you want.  Adding new attributes to standards-track BGP 
that require a "refresh" function through *some* new attribute by the origin 
AND independently by each transit AS (and perhaps each BGPSEC-enabled BGP 
router therein) under the auspices of "key rollover" rather than "freshness" 
is, well, still pretty much the same thing functionally - they're still 
periodic updates in a soft state protocol that don't exist in BGP today.

I still contend that doing anything to introduce periodic updates in the global 
inter-domain routing system is a terrible idea and is something we should avoid 
altogether.  Even [ripv1-rfc1058] provides some hints as to why this is a bad 
idea.

I know we're focusing on hyper-deduced stuff here, but the combinatorial 
effects of orders of magnitude larger updates in BGP through BGPSEC proposals, 
breaking and effectively disabling the ability for BGP update packing anywhere, 
considerable added churn through origination and transit node-triggered 
"beacons", and added processing overhead for cryptographic functions for 
signing and validation, all in today's BGP, sure makes me real concern about 
our goals and if the reward outweighs the risk here.

I highly recommend that these documents be experimental and people playing with 
this stuff in BGP do so in closed environments, not on routers attached to the 
global routing system; it's fragile enough as is.


-danny

[!=beacon?] http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/85/slides/slides-85-sidr-4.pdf
[ripv1-1058] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1058

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