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rfc:rfc2208

Network Working Group A. Mankin, Ed. Request for Comments: 2208 USC/ISI Category: Informational F. Baker

                                                         Cisco Systems
                                                             B. Braden
                                                               USC/ISI
                                                            S. Bradner
                                                               Harvard
                                                             M. O`Dell
                                                    UUNET Technologies
                                                            A. Romanow
                                                      Sun Microsystems
                                                            A. Weinrib
                                                     Intel Corporation
                                                              L. Zhang
                                                                  UCLA
                                                        September 1997
                Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP)
                 Version 1 Applicability Statement
                   Some Guidelines on Deployment

Status of this Memo

 This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
 not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
 memo is unlimited.

Abstract

 This document describes the applicability of RSVP along with the
 Integrated Services protocols and other components of resource
 reservation and offers guidelines for deployment of resource
 reservation at this time.  This document accompanies the first
 submission of RSVP and integrated services specifications onto the
 Internet standards track.

Mankin, Ed., et. al. Informational [Page 1] RFC 2208 RSVP Applicability and Deployment September 1997

1. Introduction

 RSVP [RFC 2205] is a unicast and multicast signalling protocol,
 designed to install and maintain reservation state information at
 each router along the path of a stream of data.  The state handled by
 RSVP is defined by services [RFC 2211] and [RFC 2212] specified by
 the Integrated Services WG.  These services and RSVP are being
 introduced to the IETF's standards track jointly.  From henceforth,
 the acronym RSVP on its own is used as a shorthand for the signalling
 protocol combined with the integrated service specifications.
 RSVP must be used in conjunction with several additional components,
 described in Table 1.
        Table 1  Additional Components of Resource Reservation
 1. Message formats in which parameters for desired services can be
    expressed. A proposed standard set of these formats is specified
    in [RFC 2210].
 2. Router and host mechanisms (e.g. packet classification and
    scheduling, admission control algorithms) to implement one or
    both of the models [RFC 2211] and [RFC 2212], which are also
    in the standards track.
 3. Message formats in which parameters for desired policies for
    admission control and resource use can be expressed.  A small
    common subset of these formats for standards track is in the
    RSVP WG's charter.  The Policy objects in the RSVP Protocol
    Specification are optional only at this time.
 4. Diversely located mechanisms implementing desired admission
    control policy functions, including authorization and other
    security mechanisms.
 In the presence of some form of each component in Table 1, RSVP-
 enabled applications can achieve differentiated qualities of service
 across IP networks.  Networked multimedia applications, many of which
 require (or will benefit from) a predictable end-user experience, are
 likely to be initial users of RSVP-signalled services.
 Because RSVP and the integrated services and other components listed
 in Table 1 mark a significant change to the service model of IP
 networks, RSVP has received considerable interest and press in
 advance of its release as a standards track RFC.  At present, many
 vendors of operating systems and routers are incorporating RSVP and
 integrated services into their products for near-future availability.
 The goal of this applicability statement is to describe those uses of

Mankin, Ed., et. al. Informational [Page 2] RFC 2208 RSVP Applicability and Deployment September 1997

 the current RSVP specification that are known to be feasible, and to
 identify areas of limitation and ongoing chartered work addressing
 some of these limitations.

2. Issues Affecting Deployment of RSVP

 Wide scale deployment of RSVP must be approached with care, as there
 remains a number of outstanding issues that may affect the success of
 deployment.

2.1. Scalability

 The resource requirements (processing and storage) for running RSVP
 on a router increase proportionally with the number of separate
 sessions (i.e., RSVP reservations).  Thus, supporting numerous small
 reservations on a high-bandwidth link may easily overly tax the
 routers and is inadvisable.  Furthermore, implementing the packet
 classification and scheduling capabilities currently used to provide
 differentiated services for reserved flows may be very difficult for
 some router products or on some of their high-speed interfaces (e.g.
 OC-3 and above).
 These scaling issues imply that it will generally not be appropriate
 to deploy RSVP on high-bandwidth backbones at the present time.
 Looking forward, the operators of such backbones will probably not
 choose to naively implement RSVP for each separate stream.  Rather,
 techniques are being developed that will, at the "edge" of the
 backbone, aggregate together the streams that require special
 treatment.  Within the backbone, various less costly approaches would
 then be used to set aside resources for the aggregate as a whole, as
 a way of meeting end-to-end requirements of individual flows.
 In the near term, various vendors are likely to use diverse
 approaches to the aggregation of reservations.  There is not
 currently chartered work in the IETF for development of standards in
 this space. A BOF, Future Directions of Differential Services, on
 April 7, 1997, at the Memphis IETF, is to consider the IETF's next
 steps on this, among other issues.  Public documentation of
 aggregation techniques and experience is encouraged.

2.2. Security Considerations

 The RSVP WG submission for Proposed Standard includes two security-
 related documents [Baker96, RFC 2207]. [Baker96] addresses denial and
 hijacking or theft of service attacks.  [RFC 2207] addresses RSVP
 mechanisms for data flows that themselves use IPSEC.

Mankin, Ed., et. al. Informational [Page 3] RFC 2208 RSVP Applicability and Deployment September 1997

 The first document is proposed to protect against spoofed reservation
 requests arriving at RSVP routers; such requests might be used to
 obtain service to unauthorized parties or to lock up network
 resources in a denial of service attack.  Modified and spoofed
 reservation requests are detected by use of hop-by-hop MD5 checksums
 (in an Integrity Object) between RSVP neighbor routers.  As
 described, RSVP hop-by-hop authentication assumes that key management
 and distribution for routers is resolved and deployed.  Until an
 effective key infrastructure is in place, manually keyed session
 integrity might be used.  In addition, [Baker96] may be updated with
 RFC 2085.
 That RSVP needs an effective key infrastructure among routers is not
 unique to RSVP: it is widely acknowledged that there are numerous
 denial of service attacks on the routing infrastructure (quite
 independent of RSVP) that will only be resolved by deployment of a
 key infrastructure.
 Theft of service risks will require the user to deploy with caution.
 An elementary precaution is to configure management logging of new
 and changed filter specifications in RSVP-enabled infrastructure,
 e.g. the newFlow trap [RFC 2206].
 The Integrity object defined by [Baker96] may also play a role in
 policy control, as will be described in 2.3.
 The second security-related document provides a mechanism for
 carrying flows in which the transport and user octets have been
 encrypted (RFC 1827).  Although such encryption is highly beneficial
 to certain applications, it is not relevant to the functional
 security of RSVP or reservations.
 The following section on Policy Control includes additional
 discussion of RSVP authorization security.

2.3. Policy Control

 Policy control addresses the issue of who can, or cannot, make
 reservations once a reservation protocol can be used to set up
 unequal services.
 Currently, the RSVP specification defines a mechanism for
 transporting policy information along with reservations.  However,
 the specification does not define policies themselves.  At present,
 vendors have stated that they will use the RSVP-defined mechanism to
 implement proprietary policies.

Mankin, Ed., et. al. Informational [Page 4] RFC 2208 RSVP Applicability and Deployment September 1997

 The RSVP WG is chartered to specify a simple standardized policy
 object and complete simple mechanisms for session use of the
 Integrity object in the near future.  This applicability statement
 may be updated at the completion of the WG's charter.
 Before any decision to deploy RSVP, it would be wise to ensure that
 the policy control available from a vendor is adequate for the
 intended usage.  In addition to the lack of documented policy
 mechanisms in any of the policy areas (such as access control,
 authorization, and accounting), the community has little experience
 with describing, setting and controlling policies that limit Internet
 service.  Therefore it is likely that vendor solutions will be
 revised often, particularly before the IETF has developed any policy
 specification.

3. Recommendations

 Given the current form of the RSVP specifications, multimedia
 applications to be run within an intranet are likely to be the first
 to benefit from RSVP.  SNA/DLSW is another "application" considered
 likely to benefit.  Within the single or small number of related
 administrative domains of an intranet, scalability, security and
 access policy will be more manageable than in the global Internet,
 and risk will be more controllable.  Use of RSVP and supporting
 components for small numbers of flows within a single Internet
 Service Provider is similar to an intranet use.
 Current experience with RSVP has been collected only from test runs
 in limited testbeds and intranet deployment.  We recommend that
 people begin to use RSVP in production intranet or limited ISP
 environments (as mentioned above), in which benefits can be realized
 without having to resolve some of the issues described in Section 2.
 To quote RFC 2026 about the use of Proposed Standard technology:
   Implementors should treat Proposed Standards as immature
   specifications.  It is desirable to implement them in order to gain
   experience and to validate, test, and clarify the specification.
   However, since the content of Proposed Standards may be changed if
   problems are found or better solutions are identified, deploying
   implementations of such standards into a disruption-sensitive
   environment is not recommended.
 General issues of scalability, security and policy control as
 outlined in Section 2 are the subjects of active research and
 development, as are a number of topics beyond this applicability
 statement, such as third-party setup of either reservations or
 differentiated service.

Mankin, Ed., et. al. Informational [Page 5] RFC 2208 RSVP Applicability and Deployment September 1997

4. References

 [Baker96]  Baker, F., "RSVP Cryptographic Authentication", Work in
         Progress.
 [RFC 2206], Baker, F. and J. Krawczyk, "RSVP Management Information
         Base", RFC 2206, September 1997.
 [RFC 2207]  Berger, L. and T. O'Malley, "RSVP Extensions for IPSEC
         Data Flows", RFC 2207, September 1997.
 [RFC 2211] Wroclawski, J., "Specification of Controlled-Load
         Network Element Service", RFC 2211, September 1997.
 [RFC 2212] Shenker, S., C. Partridge and R. Guerin, "Specification
         of Guaranteed Quality of Service", RFC 2212, September 1997.
 [RFC 2205]  Braden, R. Ed. et al, "Resource ReserVation Protocol
         -- Version 1 Functional Specification", RFC 2205,
         September 1997.
 [RFC 2210] Wroclawski, J., "The Use of RSVP with IETF Integrated
         Services", RFC 2210, September 1997.

5. Authors' Addresses

 Fred Baker                    Abel Weinrib
 Cisco Systems                 Intel Corporation
 Phone: 408-526-4257           Phone: 503-264-8972
 EMail: fred@cisco.com         EMail: aweinrib@ibeam.intel.com
 Bob Braden
 USC/ISI                       Lixia Zhang
 4676 Admiralty Way            UCLA Computer Science Department
 Marina Del Rey, CA 90292      4531G Boelter Hall
 Phone: 310-822-1511           Los Angeles, CA 90095-1596 USA
 EMail: braden@isi.edu         Phone: 310-825-2695
                               EMail: lixia@cs.ucla.edu
 Scott Bradner                 Allyn Romanow
 Harvard University            Sun Microsystems
 Phone: 617-495-3864           Phone: 415-786-5179
 EMail: sob@harvard.edu        EMail: allyn@eng.sun.com
 Michael O'Dell		 Allison Mankin	
 UUNET Technologies		 mankin@east.isi.edu
 Phone: 703-206-5471
 EMail: mo@uu.net

Mankin, Ed., et. al. Informational [Page 6]

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