[Hipsec] fault-tolerance for base exchange and update

Miika Komu <miika.komu@hiit.fi> Thu, 07 January 2010 07:20 UTC

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Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2010 09:22:31 +0200
From: Miika Komu <miika.komu@hiit.fi>
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Subject: [Hipsec] fault-tolerance for base exchange and update
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Hi,

Baris Boyvat has implemented an experimental fault-tolerance extension 
for the HIP base exchange and UPDATE in the HIPL implementation. He will 
document it in his master thesis during this year, but I would like to 
start discussion of the topic already now.

At the protocol level, the extension allows sending multiple I1 or 
UPDATE-with-locator packets sequentially. The idea is to scan through 
all possible source and destination IP pairs at the HIP layer to improve 
  the chances for successful initial contact (I1) and to re-establish 
contact (UPDATE-with-locator) in way similar to the NAT-ICE extensions. 
We have playfully called the extension as "shotgun" mode in the 
implementation :)

The obvious difference to ICE is that the shotgun mode works at the HIP 
protocol layer. A non-obvious difference is that the approach supports 
also fault-tolerance for a single relay/rendezvous (Responder's RVS has 
crashed) and it can make use of multiple relay/rendezvous servers for 
better redundancy. At the moment, neither of these are possible direcly 
with the ICE-NAT extensions. I actually believe the shotgun approach can 
be applied even with the ICE-NAT extensions to improve fault-tolerance.

The shotgun approach seems useful to improve fault-tolerance with an 
without (single or multiple) rendezvous/relay middleboxes, but there is 
also another use case for this. The Initiator (or Mobile Node) can learn 
multiple mappings for the peer, some of which may have connectivity and 
some not. It is also possible that a malign user intentionally sends 
invalid mappings for a well-known service in a multiuser system (this 
case also requires some rate control for mappings per user). In such 
scenarios, it is useful to try multiple peer addresses sequentially 
instead of just single one.

Minimally, the approach requires few considerations in an implementation:

i) Allow sending of multiple I1 and UPDATE-with-locator packets in a 
rate-controlled fashion
ii) Filter redundant incoming packets.

Case (ii) could be implemented as filtering of I1 packets or filtering 
of R1 packets. We chose filtering of redundant R1 packets in the 
implementation and it required a small change in the state machine. For 
the UPDATE filtering, filtering based on sequence numbers was sufficient.

I would like the WG feedback on whether we could include this approach 
in RFC5201-bis and RFC5206-bis (as MAY or SHOULD).

P.S. Maybe Baris has something to add or to explain some details better.

[Hipsec] fault-tolerance for base exchange and up… Miika Komu
Re: [Hipsec] fault-tolerance for base exchange an… Andrew McGregor
Re: [Hipsec] fault-tolerance for base exchange an… Tobias Heer
Re: [Hipsec] fault-tolerance for base exchange an… Miika Komu
Re: [Hipsec] fault-tolerance for base exchange an… Laganier, Julien
Re: [Hipsec] fault-tolerance for base exchange an… Miika Komu