[Chapter-delegates] A Follow-Up to the Rough Guide to ISOC's IETF73 Hot Topics

Thu Mar 12 19:39:09 PDT 2009

Dear Colleagues,

You may recall that Leslie Daigle and her team in 'Standards and  
Technology' offered a “rough guide” to hot topics being discussed  
at the 73rd IETF.  They have now produced a follow up to that guide  
where they offer highlights of the events from the 73rd IETF. A "rough  
guide" to the hot topics for the 74th IETF will be available soon.

On behalf of Leslie's group we hope you find this document useful.

Best wishes
Anne
--

Introduction

This is a follow up to the rough guide for the 73rd IETF. The text is  
mostly from the “rough guide” with embedded text for the areas  
being reported.  Four topics were focussed on:

1. Bandwidth Management
2. IPv4/IPv6 Coexistence
3. DNSSEC
4. Trust and Identity

Post meeting comments are indicated by ">>" at the beginning of the  
text and "<<" at the end.

1. Bandwidth Management

As P2P and VoIP technologies become more prevalent, and network usage  
patterns sometimes deviate from their architects' expectations,  
management of bandwidth to allow best use for customers becomes an  
increasingly important topic.

 >>Mat Ford of the Internet Society Standards and Technology  
department and Kevin Chege of the Kenya Education Network produced an  
article on bandwidth management for the IETF Journal that can be  
reached here: http://www.isoc.org/tools/blogs/ietfjournal/?cat=18#post-586 
. <<

Key meetings at IETF73:

ALTO WG -- application techniques for identifying and using bandwidth  
parameters.

Designing and specifying a service that will provide applications with  
information to perform better-than-random initial peer selection based  
on factors including maximum bandwidth, minimum cross-domain traffic,  
lowest cost to the user, etc.

 >>Slides and meeting minutes are here:
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/08nov/alto.html

Meeting concluded with disagreement about how to handle requirements,  
and continuing lack of clarity about what the requirements are.  
Several solution-space proposals were presented, but it is still too  
early for convergence here. <<

WG page: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/alto-charter.html

LEDBAT WG -- alternative transport congestion management techniques  
Chartered to standardize a congestion control mechanism that should  
saturate the bottleneck, maintain low delay, and yield to standard  
TCP.   What this means in practice - applications that do large  
background transfers (e.g. P2P apps) could use this mechanism and  
would then automatically yield in the presence of bursty web traffic,  
or other TCP- using apps. Particularly useful for P2P uploads on thin  
home uplinks.

 >>Meeting minutes and slides are here:
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/08nov/ledbat.html <<

 >>Lots of good technical discussion in the meeting. Since the meeting  
there has been little traffic on the mailing list.  The WG chair has  
just published an I-D describing the BitTorrent approach to congestion  
control:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-shalunov-ledbat-congestion-00.txt 
. <<

WG page: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ledbat-charter.html

2. IPv4/IPv6 Coexistence

As there is increasing momentum to deploy IPv6, as well as recognition  
that IPv4 and IPv6 network realities must coexist, work is being done  
to develop specifications to allow interoperable behaviour between  
networked realities.

 >>Fred Baker produced an article for the IETF Journal describing the  
some of the issues that are being addressed in the BEHAVE and  
SOFTWIRES.  This article can be reached here:
http://www.isoc.org/tools/blogs/ietfjournal/?cat=18#post-580. <<

BEHAVE WG -- NAT standardization WG
Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT), alternatives to CGNAT, new approaches to v4/ 
v6 translation, IPv6 NAT

 >>Work continues in all of the identified areas.  Mat Ford and Phil  
Roberts of the Internet Standards and Technology department have  
produced  an internet- draft with Alain Durand of Comcast describing  
some of the limitations of approaches to shared addressing that are  
being discussed as transition steps between the completion of IPv4  
address allocation and the deployment of IPv6: draft-ford-shared- 
addressing-issues-00.txt.  It will be discussed in the shared  
addressing BOF at IETF 74 which is described in the IETF 74 rough guide.

One of the most contentious discussions was the discussion of NAT  
specification for IPv6.  During IETF 74 there will be a BOF session to  
discuss whether and how to specify NAT translation for IPv6 to IPv6.   
There will be more detail about this in the IETF 74 rough guide. <<

 >>Meeting minutes and slides are at:
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/08nov/behave.html <<

WG Page is here: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/behave-charter.html

SOFTWIRE WG -- DSlite dual stack
Tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 to enable incremental IPv6 deployment and to  
address the imminent IPv4 address shortage for large providers.

 >>Slides are here, minutes appear to be unavailable:
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/08nov/softwire.html

It is understood that a merger of the ds-lite and a+p proposals is  
underway, but no draft has been published to date. <<

WG Page is here: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/softwire-charter.html

3. DNSSEC

While the US Department of Commerce is calling for input on the  
question of signing the DNS root (using DNSSEC), IETF working group  
discussions will be focused on refinements of the technology, and  
consideration of implications of IPv6 NATing (for coexistence with  
IPv4) and DNSSEC.

DNSEXT WG -- DNS extensions

Meeting minutes are here:
  http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/08nov/minutes/dnsext.txt

 >>The public attention Kaminsky brought to DNS cache poisoning in  
July highlighted the urgency of deploying DNSSEC, which DNSEXT had  
specified.  Most of the meeting focussed on discussion of different  
techniques that could improve the security of DNS.  Most of the  
comments were that these other techniques were interim measures only,  
and that effort should be concentrated on deploying DNSSEC. <<

WG page: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/dnsext-charter.html

4. Issues of Trust and Identity

As concerns increase about security of infrastructure, privacy, trust  
and identity on the Internet, these themes are appearing in several  
working group discussions.

DKIM WG -- e-mail infrastructure
WG page:  http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/dkim-charter.html

Meeting minutes from IETF 73 are here:
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/08nov/minutes/dkim.txt

Slides from IETF 73 are here:
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/08nov/index.html

  >>The two major items under discussion at IETF 73 were the draft  
deployment and operations guide and a possible re-chartering to take  
on standards for domain reputation services. <<

 >>The group provided feedback and the draft guidelines were revised:
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/dkim/draft-ietf-dkim-deployment/ <<

 >>The revised text includes a substantive discussion of a Systems  
View of Email Trust Assessment (Sec. 2.1) that is particularly  
relevant to the overall question of network trust.

The reputation services discussion did not find enough support within  
the DKIM group to further either re-chartering or additional  
examination of the topic at this time. The group agreed the this was  
an interesting and hard problem but felt that there was not yet  
interest nor clarity to support a standards effort (yet). <<

GEOPRIV WG -- privacy issues
WG page:  http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/geopriv-charter.html
Meeting minutes from IETF 73 are here:
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/08nov/minutes/geopriv.txt
Slides from IETF 73 are here:
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/08nov/index.html

 >>The GEOPRIV working group had a packed agenda at IETF 73 and  
reviewed a number of active drafts. Issues concerning discovery  
mechanisms and the use of URIs were common across several drafts. The  
group also discussed third party access to location data. A cross-area  
discussion on the use of identifiers was moved to lists due to lack of  
time and broader apps area participation at the face to face meeting.

Several of the active drafts have now been extensively revised and a  
number of individual author drafts are also in process. Interesting  
topics include civic addressing (which includes elements of regional  
policy), privacy as a property of the target device (NOT the device  
holder), and on-going work on discovery. <<

http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-*-geopriv-?maxhits=100&key=date&dir=desc

SIDR WG -- resource certification

 >>Meeting minutes are at:
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/08nov/minutes/sidr.txt

Most of the meeting involved discussion of specific details of the  
format and signatures of Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs).  Revision  
details for the architecture document on a public key infrastructure  
(PKI) for Internet number resources (RPKI), and representing policy in  
certificates were also discussed. <<

WG page:  http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/sidr-charter.html