Re: [mpls] Some comments on draft-kompella-mpls-entropy-lables

[Shane Amante <shane at castlepoint.net>]

Stewart,

Finishing the second half of this e-mail.  Apologies for the delay.

On Jul 9, 2008, at 5:07 AM, Stewart Bryant wrote:
> 6.  Security Considerations
>
>  Having security is a Good Thing.
>
> SB> Firstly it's worth noting in the Security section that care is  
> needed not
> SB> to make this label some sort of covert channel.

I'm not sure I understand why you think an entropy label could become  
a 'covert channel'.  Do you mean for the purposes of quickly  
identifying a microflow?  If so, that risk already exists today, (by  
looking for EOS + 0100b, etc.).


> SB> Secondly kind of the opposite of the above. You called it an  
> entropy
> SB> label and we (who independently thought this up) called it a load
> SB> balance label. We should pick on or the other. However that causes

I understand where you're coming from, but one advantage of calling  
this an entropy label is that it's at the Tunnel Label level vs. the  
Load-Balance Label, which is at the PW level.  While "entropy label"  
might not be the coolest name, perhaps it's worth keeping them  
different to avoid confusion down the road?


> SB> to wonder if there is some other use that we will find for that 20
> SB> bits? If so perhaps we should call it a context label?
> SB> I put that remark down here because it flys in the face of my
> SB> first comment about covert channels.

I would advocate a more narrow definition of a entropy-label, unless  
you can think of some actual use cases where we would re-use these 20- 
bits.


> 7.  Acknowledgments
>
>  We wish to thank Ulrich Drafz for his contributions, as well as the
>  entire "hash label" team for their valuable comments and discussion.
>
> SB> There are so few of us we could probably be named :)

We will do that in the next rev.

Thanks,

-shane
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