[rrg] Questions about LISP+ALT

Michael Menth wrote to the LISP-mailinglist (without getting any onlist-response) a while ago:

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Dear colleagues,

I have some questions about LISP+ALT since some pieces of that
architecture are not yet clear to me. Either I have overlooked that
information in the drafts or they are not yet publicly available.

1) The question of control

Who has the control over ALT? Who decides what the aggregation points are?

2) Who's paying for the map-request traffic?

In LISP+ALT, map-requests are carried over the ALT. In contrast, data
traffic is carried over paths provided by "traditional BGP" for which
intermediate carriers are obliged by contracts to carry the traffic.
What are the incentives for providers to forward map-requests if they
have no relations to the source or destination of that traffic. This
situation seems possible or even likely to me for aggregation nodes.

a) Does the ALT topology follow contract relationships like the normal
BGP which possibly makes aggregation difficult?

b) Will there be extra contracts to carry map-request traffic on the ALT`?

c) Or will that work with mutual agreements since the overall rate of
the map-request traffic is hopefully small enough to be carried without
financial backing?

Or is there another option?

3) The structure of the ALT and data-probes

What are the guideline for designing the paths in the ALT? Business and
trust relationships dominate the paths in the normal BGP. Aggregation
should be the objective in the ALT, right? Can't that lead to extremely
long paths when EID-prefix-aggregators on different levels are located
in different areas? This adds to delay which is especially unfortunate
for data-probes which are currently not considered in ALT. What was
actually the reason to renounce on data-probes in the current version of
LISP?

4) Resilience

LISP+ALT uses ETRs as authoritative sources of the mappings and
map-requests are delivered to them over the ALT. Multihomed networks
have several ETRs which improve their availability. Which mechanism
makes sure that map-requests are deviated to another ETR if the primary
ETR fails?

5) Security

Are there plans yet to add security in LISP+ALT?

Kind regards,

Michael
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Patte presented his ideas about some hierarchy in scalable_routing.doc.

No one ever answered, neither on the LISP nor RRG mailinglist. All who support such solutions (LISP and the many variants) should comment on the reproach, that the distributed database (ALT) in mind would be extremely vulnerable (who owns these mapping servers, will own the internet; who can attack successfully them will tear down the entire internet).

Heiner