RFC 0000 Homenet Babel profile July 2018
Chroboczek Standards Track [Page]
Stream:
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
RFC:
0000
Category:
Standards Track
Published:
ISSN:
2070-1721
Author:
J. Chroboczek
IRIF, University of Paris-Diderot

Homenet profile of the Babel routing protocol

Abstract

This document defines the exact subset of the Babel routing protocol and its extensions that is required by an implementation of the Homenet protocol suite, as well as the interactions between the Home Networking Control Protocol (HNCP) and Babel.

Status of This Memo

This is an Internet Standards Track document.

This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 7841.

Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc0000.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Algorithm:

Single octet identifying the algorithm. The following values are defined by this document:

0:
Shortest Path First (SPF) ...
1:
Strict Shortest Path First (SPF) ...

The core of the Homenet protocol suite consists of the Home Networking Control Protocol (HNCP) [RFC7788], a protocol used for flooding configuration information and assigning prefixes to links, combined with the Babel routing protocol [RFC6126bis]. Babel is an extensible, flexible and modular protocol: minimal implementations of Babel have been demonstrated that consist of a few hundred lines of code, while the "large" implementation includes support for a number of extensions and consists of over ten thousand lines of C code.

This document consists of two parts. The first specifies the exact subset of the Babel protocol and its extensions that is required by an implementation of the Homenet protocol suite. The second specifies how HNCP interacts with Babel.

1.1. Requirement Language

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

1.2. Background

The Babel routing protocol and its extensions are defined in a number of documents:

2. The Homenet profile of Babel

2.1. Requirements

REQ1:

a Homenet implementation of Babel MUST encapsulate Babel control traffic in IPv6 packets sent to the IANA-assigned port 6696 and either the IANA-assigned multicast group ff02::1:6 or to a link-local unicast address.

  • Rationale: since Babel is able to carry both IPv4 and IPv6 routes over either IPv4 or IPv6, choosing the protocol used for carrying control traffic is a matter of preference. Since IPv6 has some features that make implementations somewhat simpler and more reliable (notably properly scoped and reasonably stable link-local addresses), we require carrying control data over IPv6.
REQ2:

a Homenet implementation of Babel MUST implement the IPv6 subset of the protocol defined in the body of RFC 6126bis.

  • Rationale: support for IPv6 routing is an essential component of the Homenet architecture.

REQ3: a Homenet implementation of Babel SHOULD implement the IPv4 subset of the protocol defined in the body of RFC 6126bis. Use of other techniques for acquiring IPv4 connectivity (such as multiple layers of NAT) is strongly discouraged.

REQ4: a Homenet implementation of Babel MUST implement source-specific routing for IPv6, as defined in draft-ietf-babel-source-specific [BABEL-SS].

REQ5: a Homenet implementation of Babel must use metrics that are of a similar magnitude to the values suggested in Appendix A of RFC 6126bis. In particular, it SHOULD assign costs that are no less than 256 to wireless links, and SHOULD assign costs between 32 and 196 to lossless wired links.

REQ6: a Homenet implementation of Babel SHOULD distinguish between wired and wireless links; if it is unable to determine whether a link is wired or wireless, it SHOULD make the worst-case hypothesis that the link is wireless. It SHOULD dynamically probe the quality of wireless links and derive a suitable metric from its quality estimation. Appendix A of RFC 6126bis gives an example of a suitable algorithm.

2.2. Optional features

OPT1:

a Homenet implementation of Babel MAY perform route selection by applying hysteresis to route metrics, as suggested in Section 3.6 of RFC 6126bis and described in detail in Section III.E of [BABEL-RTT]. However, hysteresis is not required, and the implementation may simply pick the route with the smallest metric.

  • Rationale: hysteresis is only useful in congested and highly dynamic networks. In a typical home network, stable and uncongested, the feedback loop that hysteresis compensates for does not occur.
OPT2:

a Homenet implementation of Babel may include support for other extensions to the protocol, as long as they are known to interoperate with both the core protocol and source-specific routing.

  • Rationale: a number of extensions to the Babel routing protocol have been defined over the years; however, they are useful in fairly specific situations, such as routing over global-scale overlay networks [BABEL-RTT] or multi-hop wireless networks with multiple radio frequencies [BABEL-Z]. Hence, with the exception of source-specific routing, no extensions are required for Homenet.

NOW THE SAME TEXT USING ASIDE ELEMENT

3. Interactions between HNCP and Babel

The Homenet architecture cleanly separates configuration, which is done by HNCP, from routing, which is done by Babel. While the coupling between the two protocols is deliberately kept to a minimum, some interactions are unavoidable.

All the interactions between HNCP and Babel consist of HNCP causing Babel to perform an announcement on its behalf (under no circumstances does Babel cause HNCP to perform an action). How this is realised is an implementation detail that is outside the scope of this document; while it could conceivably be done using a private communication channel between HNCP and Babel, in existing implementations HNCP installs a route in the operating system's kernel which is later picked up by Babel using the existing redistribution mechanisms.

3.1. Requirements

REQ7: if an HNCP node receives a DHCPv6 prefix delegation for prefix P and publishes an External-Connection TLV containing a Delegated-Prefix TLV with prefix P and no Prefix-Policy TLV, then it MUST announce a source-specific default route with source prefix P over Babel.

REQ8: if an HNCP node receives a DHCPv4 lease with an IPv4 address and wins the election for NAT gateway, then it MUST act as a NAT gateway and MUST announce a (non-specific) IPv4 default route over Babel.

REQ9: if an HNCP node assigns a prefix P to an attached link and announces P in an Assigned-Prefix TLV, then it MUST announce a route towards P over Babel.

3.2. Optional features

OPT3: an HNCP node that receives a DHCPv6 prefix delegation MAY announce a non-specific IPv6 default route over Babel in addition to the source-specific default route mandated by requirement REQ7.

OPT4: an HNCP node that receives a DHCPv4 lease with an IPv4 address and wins the election for NAT gateway SHOULD NOT announce a source-specific IPv4 default route.

4. Security Considerations

Both HNCP and Babel carry their control data in IPv6 packets with a link-local source address, and implementations are required to drop packets sent from a global address. Hence, they are only susceptible to attacks from a directly connected link on which the HNCP and Babel implementations are listening.

The security of a Homenet network relies on having a set of "Internal", "Ad Hoc" and "Hybrid" interfaces (Section 5.1 of [RFC7788]) that are assumed to be connected to links that are secured at a lower layer. HNCP and Babel packets are only accepted when they originate on these trusted links. "External" and "Guest" interfaces are connected to links that are not trusted, and any HNCP or Babel packets that are received on such interfaces are ignored. ("Leaf" interfaces are a special case, since they are connected to trusted links but HNCP and Babel traffic received on such interfaces is ignored.) This implies that the security of a Homenet network depends on the reliability of the border discovery procedure described in Section 5.3 of [RFC7788].

If untrusted links are used for transit, which is NOT RECOMMENDED, then any HNCP and Babel traffic that is carried over such links MUST be secured using an upper-layer security protocol. While both HNCP and Babel support cryptographic authentication, at the time of writing no protocol for autonomous configuration of HNCP and Babel security has been defined.

5. IANA Considerations

This document requires no actions from IANA.

6. Acknowledgments

A number of people have helped with defining the requirements listed in this document. I am especially indebted to Barbara Stark and Markus Stenberg.

7. References

7.1. Normative References

[BABEL-SS]
Boutier, M. and J. Chroboczek, "Source-Specific Routing in Babel", Internet-Draft draft-ietf-babel-source-specific-03, , <https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-babel-source-specific-03>.
[RFC2119]
Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, , <https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC2119>.
[RFC6126bis]
Chroboczek, J. and D. Schinazi, "The Babel Routing Protocol", Internet Draft draft-ietf-babel-rfc6126bis-04, .
[RFC7788]
Stenberg, M., Barth, S., and P. Pfister, "Home Networking Control Protocol", RFC 7788, DOI 10.17487/RFC7788, , <https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC7788>.
[RFC8174]
Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174, , <https://doi.org/10.17487/RFC8174>.

7.2. Informative References

[BABEL-RTT]
Jonglez, B. and J. Chroboczek, "Delay-based Metric Extension for the Babel Routing Protocol", Internet-Draft draft-jonglez-babel-rtt-extension-01, , <https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-jonglez-babel-rtt-extension-01>.
[BABEL-Z]
Chroboczek, J., "Diversity Routing for the Babel Routing Protocol", Internet-Draft draft-chroboczek-babel-diversity-routing-01, , <https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-chroboczek-babel-diversity-routing-01>.
[DELAY-BASED]
Jonglez, B. and J. Chroboczek, "A delay-based routing metric", . Available online from http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.3488
[RFC7298]
Ovsienko, D., "Babel Hashed Message Authentication Code (HMAC) Cryptographic Authentication", RFC 7298, , <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7298>.
[ToS-SPECIFIC]
Chouasne, G., "https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-chouasne-babel-tos-specific-00.xml", Internet-Draft draft-chouasne-babel-tos-specific-00, , <https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-chouasne-babel-tos-specific-00>.

Author's Address

IRIF, University of Paris-Diderot
Juliusz Chroboczek
Case 7014
75205 Paris Cedex 13
France