Keying and Authentication for Routing Protocols (karp) ------------------------------------------------------ Charter Last Modified: 2010-02-23 Current Status: Active Working Group Chair(s): Brian Weis Joel Halpern Routing Area Director(s): Stewart Bryant Adrian Farrel Routing Area Advisor: Stewart Bryant Technical Advisor(s): Tim Polk Mailing Lists: General Discussion:karp@ietf.org To Subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/karp Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/karp/current/maillist.html Description of Working Group: The KARP working group is tasked to work with the routing protocol working groups in order to improve the communication security of the packets on the wire used by the routing protocols. This working group is concerned with message authentication, packet integrity, and denial of service (DoS) protection. At present, this charter explicitly excludes confidentiality and non-repudiation concerns. Authenticating the routing peer sending a message, and message integrity protection, will be provided through the use of per-packet cryptographic message authentication. Peer authentication will protect against unrecognized peers, imposter peers, and some DoS attacks aimed at routers. Protecting against misbehavior of an otherwise allowed peer router is outside the scope of this working group. Many routing protocols (or groups of protocols) already have some method for accomplishing cryptographic message authentication. In many or most cases existing methods are vulnerable to known attack, and some employ cryptographic algorithms that have been deprecated. While much work has been done to update authentication of routing protocols, current status is not consistently up to date. It is important to review and update those mechanisms to use modern security practices. Ensuring algorithm agility within routing protocols is of particular importance. A goal of the working group is to add incremental security to existing mechanisms rather than replacing them. Better deployable solutions to which vendors and operators can migrate is more important than getting a perfect security solution. Although there are many candidate routing protocols to evaluate, KARP must by necessity begin with a restricted focus. The initial set of routing protocols in scope include BGP, OSPFv2, OSPFv3, PCE, PIM, LDP, RSVP-TE, ISIS, BFD, LMP, and MSDP. The working group must coordinate very closely with other working groups, such as: - Routing protocol working groups for any routing protocol being evaluated. This coordination will include cooperatively determining the current or already planned state of the security work in the protocol. It will also include ensuring that any proposed mechanisms are consistent with the architecture and use of the protocol. Also, any specific proposal accepted as a KARP document will be developed in cooperation with the concerned protocol working group. - Security area working groups for cryptographic advice, and/or key management protocol support. Cryptographic protocol support may be required in order to support certain KARP WG milestones. Coordination with an appropriate working group in the security area would be necessary in order to get the appropriate expertise in completing a milestone. This charter provides for preliminary work in this space, although it is expected that detailed work items will be added to the charter when the problem has been better analyzed. For example, this may include a key management protocol by which routing protcols automatically negotiate keying material and policy. More about the use of a key management protocol will be captured in a framework document described below. - OPSEC working group for advice on best practices to create and use integrity keys used with routing protocol message authentication. KARP will also coordinate with other Operations and Management area WGs and/or experts in order to identify operational impacts on existing routing protocols and to identify any management extensions that may be required. Routing protocols use a range of transport mechanisms and communication relationships. There are also differences in details among the various protocols. The working group will attempt to describe the security relevant characteristics of routings protocols, such as the use or non-use of TCP, or the frequent use of group communication versus purely pairwise communication. Using these characteristics, the working group will then provide suitable common frameworks that can be applied, and tailored, to improve the communication security of the routing protocols. In later phases, it is expected that the working group will investigate the suitably of defining conceptual structures and APIs, so as to enable further work to be more effective. Work Items: - Determine current threats to the routing protocol operation, and define general requirements for cryptographic authentication of routing protocols. A primary source for this document should be draft-lebovitz-karp-roadmap, although RFC 4393 may also be useful. - Identify deficiencies of each routing protocol in scope, and specify mechanisms that bring them in line with the general requirements. These are referred to as protocol gap analysis documents. - Define one or more frameworks describing the common elements for modern authentication in routing protocols. - Publish guidance on how to create a gap analysis for routing protocols. - Publish guidance on guidance to operators on how to create and use integrity keys used with routing protocol message authentication. - Specify automated key management needs for routing protocols. Goals and Milestones: Nov 2010 Submit General Framework, General Requirements, and Priorities/Work-Plan documents to the IESG to be considered as Informational RFC Nov 2010 Submit a framework document describing protocol groups and the common techniques and interfaces that apply to them to the IESG to be considered as Informational RFC Dec 2010 ubmit a document describing best practices for creating and using protocol message authentication integrity keys as a BCP Apr 2011 Submit specification document for OSPFv2 to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Apr 2011 Submit specification document for BGP to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Jul 2011 Submit specification document for OSPFv3 to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Jul 2011 Submit specification document for LDP to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Oct 2011 Submit specification document for PIM to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Oct 2011 Submit specification document for RSVP-TE to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Nov 2011 Specify automated key management needs for routing protocols using unicast techniques Jan 2012 Submit specification document for ISIS to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Jan 2012 Submit specification document for PCE to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Apr 2012 Submit specification document for MSDP to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Apr 2012 Specify automated key management needs for routing protocols using multicast techniques Apr 2012 Submit specification document for BFD to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Jul 2012 Submit specification document for LMP to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Internet-Drafts: Posted Revised I-D Title ------ ------- -------------------------------------------- Feb 2010 Sep 2010 Keying and Authentication for Routing Protocols (KARP) Design Guidelines Request For Comments: None to date.