TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions (tcpm)

Last Modified: 2006-08-08

Additional information is available at tools.ietf.org/wg/tcpm

Chair(s):

  • Ted Faber <faber@isi.edu>

  • Mark Allman <mallman@icir.org>

    Transport Area Director(s):

  • Magnus Westerlund <magnus.westerlund@ericsson.com>
  • Lars Eggert <lars.eggert@nokia.com>

    Transport Area Advisor:

  • Lars Eggert <lars.eggert@nokia.com>

    Mailing Lists:

    General Discussion: tcpm@ietf.org
    To Subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tcpm
    Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tcpm/index.html

    Description of Working Group:

    TCP is currently the Internet's predominant transport protocol.
    To maintain TCP's utility the IETF has regularly updated both the
    protocol itself and the congestion control algorithms implemented by
    the protocol that are crucial for the stability of the Internet. 
    These changes reflect our evolving understanding of transport
    protocols, congestion control and new needs presented by an ever-
    changing network.  The TCPM WG will provide a venue within the IETF to
    work on these issues.  The WG will serve several purposes:

    * The WG will mostly focus on maintenance issues (e.g., bug
      fixes) and modest changes to the protocol and algorithms
      that maintain TCP's utility.

    * The WG will be a venue for moving current TCP specifications
      along the standards track (as community energy is available
      for such efforts).

    * The WG will write a document that outlines "what is TCP".
      This document will be a roadmap of sorts to the various TCP
      specifications in the RFC series.

    TCPM will take a subset of the work which has been conducted in the
    Transport Area WG over the past several years.
    Specifically, some of the WG's initial work will be moved from the
    Transport Area WG (tsvwg).

    TCPM is expected to be the working group within the IETF to handle TCP
    changes. Proposals for additional TCP work items should be brought up
    within the working group.  While fundamental changes to TCP or its
    congestion control algorithms (e.g., departure from loss-based
    congestion control) should be brought through TCPM, it is expected
    that such large changes will ultimately be handled by the Transport
    Area WG (tsvwg). All additional work items for TCPM will, naturally,
    require the approval of the Transport Services Area Area Directors and
    the IESG.

    TCP's congestion control algorithms are the model followed by alternate
    transports (e.g., SCTP and (in some cases) DCCP).  In addition, the
    IETF has recently worked on several documents about algorithms that
    are specified for multiple protocols (e.g., TCP and SCTP) in the same
    document.  Which WG shepherds such documents in the future will
    determined on a case-by-case basis.  In any case, the TCPM WG will
    remain in close contact with other relevant WGs working on these
    protocols to ensure openness and stringent review from all angles.


    Specific Goals:

    * A document specifying a way to share the local "User TimeOut"
      value with the peer such that TCP connections can withstand long
      periods of disconnection.

    * The WG is coming to grips with how to deal with spoofed segments
      that can tear down connections, cause data corruption or
      performance problems.  To this end the WG is generating an
      overview document as well as a scheme that mitigates some of the
      issues brought on by spoofed TCP segments using a
      challenge-response scheme to reduce the probabilities of a
      connection being impacted.  Finally, the WG will produce a
      document outlining the potential impact of using ICMP messages
      to attack TCP streams.

    * The WG is writing an informational document about the ways in
      which TCPs can handle ICMP "soft errors".

    * The WG is updating the specification for Explicit Congestion
      Notification to allow for the use of ECN during part of TCP's
      three-way handshake to aid performance for short transfers.

    * The WG is writing an informational document that discusses
      commonly used, but not documented ways to combat SYN flooding
      attacks.

    * The WG is updating RFC 2581 to fix some minor specification
      problems and move it along the standards track.

    Goals and Milestones:

    Done  Submit FRTO draft to IESG for publication as an Experimental RFC
    Done  Submit TCP Roadmap document to IESG for publication as a Best Current Practices RFC
    Done  Submit NCR Reordering Mitigation draft to the IESG for publication as an Experimental RFC
    Sep 2006  Submit overview of spoofing attacks against TCP to IESG for publication as an Informational RFC.
    Oct 2006  Submit In-Window Attack draft to IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard RFC.
    Oct 2006  Submit revision of RFC 2581 to the IESG for publication as a Draft Standard.
    Nov 2006  Submit User TimeOut option document to the IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard RFC.
    Nov 2006  Submit ECN-SYN document to the IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard RFC.
    Jan 2007  Submit SYN flooding document to the IESG for publication as an Informational RFC.
    Jan 2007  Submit soft errors document to the IESG for publication as an Informational RFC.
    Jan 2007  Submit ICMP attack document to the IESG for publication as an Informational RFC.

    Internet-Drafts:

    Improving TCP's Robustness to Blind In-Window Attacks (42903 bytes)
    Defending TCP Against Spoofing Attacks (75864 bytes)
    TCP User Timeout Option (37528 bytes)
    Adding Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) Capability to TCP's SYN/ACK Packets (52677 bytes)
    TCP Congestion Control (43423 bytes)
    TCP's Reaction to Soft Errors (34104 bytes)
    ICMP attacks against TCP (93748 bytes)
    TCP SYN Flooding Attacks and Common Mitigations (50835 bytes)
    Forward RTO-Recovery (F-RTO): An Algorithm for Detecting Spurious Retransmission Timeouts with TCP (40320 bytes)

    Request For Comments:

    Forward RTO-Recovery (F-RTO): An Algorithm for Detecting Spurious Retransmission Timeouts with TCP and the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) (RFC 4138) (55538 bytes)
    Improving the Robustness of TCP to Non-Congestion Events (RFC 4653) (42268 bytes)
    A Roadmap for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) Specification Documents (RFC 4614) (75645 bytes)
    IETF Secretariat - Please send questions, comments, and/or suggestions to ietf-web@ietf.org.

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