Limited Domains and Internet
Protocols
The University of Auckland
School of Computer Science
University of Auckland
PB 92019
Auckland
1142
New Zealand
brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com
Huawei Technologies
Q14, Huawei Campus
No. 156 Beiqing Road
Hai-Dian District, Beijing
100095
China
leo.liubing@huawei.com
There is a noticeable trend towards network behaviors
and semantics that are specific to a particular set of requirements
applied within a limited region of the Internet. Policies, default parameters,
the options supported, the style of network management, and security
requirements may vary between such limited regions. This document reviews
examples of such limited domains (also known as controlled environments),
notes emerging solutions, and includes a related taxonomy. It then
briefly discusses the standardization of protocols for limited domains.
Finally, it shows the need for a precise definition of "limited domain membership"
and for mechanisms to allow nodes to join a domain securely and to find other
members, including boundary nodes.
This document is the product of the research of the authors. It has
been produced through discussions and consultation within the IETF
but is not the product of IETF consensus.
Introduction
As the Internet continues to grow and diversify, with a realistic
prospect of tens of billions of nodes being connected directly and
indirectly, there is a noticeable trend towards network-specific and
local requirements, behaviors, and semantics. The word "local" should
be understood in a special sense, however. In some cases, it may refer to
geographical and physical locality -- all the nodes in a single building,
on a single campus, or in a given vehicle. In other cases, it may refer
to a defined set of users or nodes distributed over a much wider area,
but drawn together by a single virtual network over the Internet, or a
single physical network running in parallel with the Internet. We expand
on these possibilities below. To capture the topic, this document refers
to such networks as "limited domains". Of course, a similar situation may
arise for a network that is completely disconnected from the Internet,
but that is not our direct concern here. However, it should not be
forgotten that interoperability is needed even within a disconnected
network.
Some people have concerns about splintering of the Internet along political
or linguistic boundaries by mechanisms that block the free flow of information.
That is not the topic of this document, which does not discuss filtering mechanisms
(see ) and does not apply to protocols that
are designed for use across the whole Internet. It is only concerned with domains
that have specific technical requirements.
The word "domain" in this document does not refer to naming domains in the DNS,
although in some cases, a limited domain might incidentally be congruent with
a DNS domain. In particular, with a "split horizon" DNS configuration
, the split might be at the edge of a limited domain.
A recent proposal for defining definite perimeters within the DNS namespace
might also be considered to be a limited
domain mechanism.
Another term that has been used in some contexts is "controlled
environment". For example,
uses this to delimit the operational scope within which a particular
tunnel encapsulation might be used. A specific example is GRE-in-UDP
encapsulation , which
explicitly states that "The controlled environment has less restrictive
requirements than the general Internet." For example,
non-congestion-controlled traffic might be acceptable within the
controlled environment. The same phrase has been used to delimit the
useful scope of quality-of-service protocols . It is not necessarily the case that protocols will
fail to operate outside the controlled environment, but rather that they
might not operate optimally. In this document, we assume that "limited
domain" and "controlled environment" mean the same thing in
practice. The term "managed network" has been used in a similar way,
e.g., . In the context of
secure multicast, a "group domain of interpretation" is defined by .
Yet more definitions of types of domains are to be found in the routing area,
such as , , and .
We conclude that the notion of a limited domain is very widespread in many aspects
of Internet technology.
The requirements of limited domains will depend on the deployment
scenario. Policies, default parameters, and the options supported may
vary. Also, the style of network management may vary between a
completely unmanaged network, one with fully autonomic management, one
with traditional central management, and mixtures of the above. Finally,
the requirements and solutions for security and privacy may vary.
This document analyzes and discusses some of the consequences of this
trend and how it may impact the idea of universal interoperability in the
Internet. First, we list examples of limited domain scenarios and of
technical solutions for limited domains, with the main focus being
the Internet layer of the protocol stack. An appendix provides a taxonomy
of the features to be found in limited domains. With this background, we
discuss the resulting challenge to the idea that all Internet standards
must be universal in scope and applicability. To the contrary, we assert
that some protocols, although needing to be standardized and interoperable,
also need to be specifically limited in their applicability.
This implies that the concepts of a limited domain, and of its membership, need
to be formalized and supported by secure mechanisms. While this document does
not propose a design for such mechanisms, it does outline some
functional requirements.
This document is the product of the research of the authors. It has
been produced through discussions and consultation within the IETF
but is not the product of IETF consensus.
Failure Modes in Today's Internet
Today, the Internet does not have a well-defined concept of limited
domains. One result of this is that certain protocols and features fail
on certain paths. Earlier analyses of this topic have focused either on
the loss of transparency of the Internet or on the
middleboxes responsible for that loss . Unfortunately, the problems
persist both in application protocols and even in very fundamental
mechanisms. For example, the Internet is not transparent to IPv6
extension headers , and Path
MTU Discovery has been unreliable for many years . IP
fragmentation is also unreliable , and problems
in TCP MSS negotiation have been reported .
On the security side, the widespread insertion of firewalls at domain
boundaries that are perceived by humans but unknown to protocols results
in arbitrary failure modes as far as the application layer is
concerned. There are operational recommendations and practices that
effectively guarantee arbitrary failures in realistic scenarios .
Domain boundaries that are defined administratively (e.g., by address
filtering rules in routers) are prone to leakage caused by human error,
especially if the limited domain traffic appears otherwise normal to the
boundary routers. In this case, the network operator needs to take
active steps to protect the boundary. This form of leakage is much less
likely if nodes must be explicitly configured to handle a given
limited-domain protocol, for example, by installing a specific protocol
handler.
Investigations of the unreliability of IP fragmentation
and the filtering of IPv6 extension headers
strongly suggest that at least for
some protocol elements, transparency is a lost cause and middleboxes are here to stay.
In the following two sections, we show that some application environments require
protocol features that cannot, or should not, cross the whole Internet.
Examples of Limited Domain Requirements
This section describes various examples where limited domain requirements can
easily be identified, either based on an application scenario or on a
technical imperative. It is, of course, not a complete list, and it is
presented in an arbitrary order, loosely from smaller to bigger.
- A home network. It will be mainly unmanaged, constructed by a non-specialist.
It must work with devices "out of the box" as shipped by their manufacturers
and must create adequate security by default. Remote access may be required.
The requirements and applicable principles are summarized in .
- A small office network. This is sometimes very similar to a home network, if whoever
is in charge has little or no specialist knowledge, but may have
differing security and privacy requirements. In other cases, it may be professionally
constructed using recommended products and configurations but operate unmanaged.
Remote access may be required.
- A vehicle network. This will be designed by the vehicle
manufacturer but may include devices added by the vehicle's owner or
operator. Parts of the network will have demanding performance and
reliability requirements with implications for human safety. Remote
access may be required to certain functions but absolutely forbidden
for others. Communication with other vehicles, roadside
infrastructure, and external data sources will be required. See for a
survey of use cases.
- Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) networks and other hard
real-time networks. These will exhibit specific technical requirements,
including tough real-time performance targets. See, for example, for numerous use cases. An example is a
building services network. This will be designed specifically for a
particular building but using standard components. Additional devices may
need to be added at any time. Parts of the network may have demanding
reliability requirements with implications for human safety. Remote access
may be required to certain functions but absolutely forbidden for others. An
extreme example is a network used for virtual reality or augmented reality
applications where the latency requirements are very stringent.
- Sensor networks. The two preceding cases will all include sensors,
but some networks may be specifically limited to sensors and the
collection and processing of sensor data. They may be in remote or
technically challenging locations and installed by
non-specialists.
- Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. While this term is very
flexible and covers many innovative types of networks, including ad hoc
networks that are formed spontaneously and some applications of 5G
technology, it seems reasonable to expect that IoT edge networks will
have special requirements and protocols that are useful only within a
specific domain, and that these protocols cannot, and for security
reasons should not, run over the Internet as a whole.
- Constrained Networks. An important subclass of IoT networks consists of constrained
networks in which the nodes
are limited in power consumption and communications bandwidth and are
therefore limited to using very frugal protocols.
- Delay-tolerant networks. These may consist of domains that are relatively
isolated and constrained in power (e.g., deep space networks) and are
connected only intermittently to the outside, with a very long latency
on such connections . Clearly,
the protocol requirements and possibilities are very specialized in
such networks.
- "Traditional" enterprise and campus networks, which may be spread
over many kilometers and over multiple separate sites, with multiple
connections to the Internet. Interestingly, the IETF appears never to
have analyzed this long-established class of networks in a general
way, except in connection with IPv6 deployment (e.g., ).
- Unsuitable standards. A situation that can arise in an enterprise
network is that the Internet-wide solution for a particular
requirement may either fail locally or be much more complicated than
is necessary. An example is that the complexity induced by a mechanism
such as Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) is not justified within such a
network. Furthermore, ICE cannot be used in some cases because
candidate addresses are not known before a call is established, so a
different local solution is essential .
- Managed wide-area networks run by service providers for enterprise
services such as Layer 2 (Ethernet, etc.) point-to-point pseudowires,
multipoint Layer 2 Ethernet VPNs using Virtual Private LAN Service
(VPLS) or Ethernet VPN (EVPN), and Layer 3 IP VPNs. These are generally characterized
by service-level agreements for availability, packet loss, and
possibly multicast service. These are different from the previous
case in that they mostly run over MPLS infrastructures, and the
requirements for these services are well defined by the IETF.
- Data centers and hosting centers, or distributed services acting
as such centers. These will have high performance, security, and
privacy requirements and will typically include large numbers of
independent "tenant" networks overlaid on shared infrastructure.
- Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), comprising distributed data centers and the paths
between them, spanning thousands of kilometers, with numerous connections to the Internet.
- Massive Web Service Provider Networks. This is a small class of
networks with well-known trademarked names, combining aspects of
distributed enterprise networks, data centers, and CDNs. They have
their own international networks bypassing the generic carriers. Like
CDNs, they have numerous connections to the Internet, typically
offering a tailored service in each economy.
Three other aspects, while not tied to specific network types, also strongly
depend on the concept of limited domains:
- Many of the above types of networks may be extended throughout
the Internet by a variety of virtual private network (VPN) techniques.
Therefore, we argue that limited domains may overlap each other in an arbitrary
fashion by use of virtualization techniques. As noted above in the discussion of
controlled environments, specific tunneling and encapsulation techniques may
be tailored for use within a given domain.
- Intent-Based Networking. In this concept, a network domain is
configured and managed in accordance with an abstract policy known as
"Intent" to ensure that the network performs as required .
Whatever technologies are used to support this will be applied
within the domain boundary, even if the services supported in the
domain are globally accessible.
- Network Slicing. A network slice is a form of virtual network that
consists of a managed set of resources carved off from a larger
network .
This is expected to be significant in 5G deployments . Whatever
technologies are used to support slicing will require a clear
definition of the boundary of a given slice within a larger
domain.
While it is clearly desirable to use common solutions, and therefore common standards,
wherever possible, it is increasingly difficult to do so while satisfying the widely varying
requirements outlined above.
However, there is a tendency when new protocols and protocol extensions are
proposed to always ask the question "How will this work across the open Internet?"
This document suggests that this is not always the best question. There are
protocols and extensions that are not intended to work across the open Internet.
On the contrary, their requirements and semantics are specifically limited (in the
sense defined above).
A common argument is that if a protocol is intended for limited use, the chances are
very high that it will in fact be used (or misused) in other scenarios including the
so-called open Internet. This is undoubtedly true and means that limited use is not
an excuse for bad design or poor security. In fact, a limited use requirement potentially
adds complexity to both the protocol and its security design, as discussed later.
Nevertheless, because of the diversity of limited domains with
specific requirements that is now emerging, specific standards (and ad
hoc standards) will probably emerge for different types of domains. There
will be attempts to capture each market sector, but the market will
demand standardized solutions within each sector. In addition,
operational choices will be made that can in fact only work within a
limited domain. The history of RSVP illustrates that a standard defined as if it could
work over the open Internet might not in fact do so. In general, we can
no longer assume that a protocol designed according to classical
Internet guidelines will in fact work reliably across the network as a
whole. However, the "open Internet" must remain as the universal method
of interconnection. Reconciling these two aspects is a major
challenge.
Examples of Limited Domain Solutions
This section lists various examples of specific limited domain
solutions that have been proposed or defined. It intentionally does not
include Layer 2 technology solutions, which by definition apply to
limited domains. It is worth noting, however, that with recent
developments such as Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links
(TRILL) or Shortest Path
Bridging , Layer 2 domains may
become very large.
- Differentiated Services. This mechanism
allows a network to assign locally significant
values to the 6-bit Differentiated Services Code Point
field in any IP packet.
Although there are some recommended code point values for specific per-hop
queue management behaviors, these are specifically intended to be
domain-specific code points with traffic being classified, conditioned, and
mapped or re-marked at domain boundaries (unless there is an inter-domain
agreement that makes mapping or re-marking unnecessary).
- Integrated Services. Although it is not intrinsic in
the design of RSVP , it is clear
from many years' experience that Integrated Services can only
be deployed successfully within a limited domain that is
configured with adequate equipment and resources.
- Network function virtualization. As described in
,
this general concept is an open research topic in which
virtual network functions are orchestrated as part of
a distributed system. Inevitably, such orchestration applies
to an administrative domain of some kind, even though
cross-domain orchestration is also a research area.
- Service Function Chaining (SFC). This technique assumes that services within a
network are constructed as sequences of individual service functions
within a specific SFC-enabled domain such as a 5G domain. As that RFC
states: "Specific features may need to be enforced at the boundaries
of an SFC-enabled domain, for example to avoid leaking SFC
information". A Network Service Header (NSH) is used to encapsulate packets flowing through the
service function chain: "The intended scope of the NSH is for use
within a single provider's operational domain."
- Firewall and Service Tickets (FAST). Such tickets would accompany a packet
to claim the right to traverse a network or request a specific network
service .
They would only be meaningful within a particular domain.
- Data Center Network Virtualization Overlays. A common requirement in data
centers that host many tenants (clients) is to provide each one with a secure
private network, all running over the same physical infrastructure.
describes various use cases for this, and specifications
are under development. These include
use cases in which the tenant network is physically split over several data
centers, but which must appear to the user as a single secure domain.
- Segment Routing. This is a technique that "steers a packet through
an ordered list of instructions, called segments"
. The semantics of
these instructions are explicitly local to a segment routing domain
or even to a single node. Technically, these segments or instructions
are represented as an MPLS label or an IPv6 address, which clearly
adds a semantic interpretation to them within the domain.
- Autonomic Networking. As explained in ,
an autonomic network is also a security domain within which an autonomic
control plane
is used by autonomic service agents. These agents manage technical objectives,
which may be locally defined, subject to domain-wide policy. Thus, the domain
boundary is important for both security and protocol purposes.
- Homenet. As shown in , a home networking
domain has specific protocol needs that differ from those in an enterprise
network or the Internet as a whole. These include the Home Network Control
Protocol (HNCP) and a naming and discovery solution
.
-
Creative uses of IPv6 features.
As IPv6 enters more general use, engineers notice that it has much more flexibility
than IPv4. Innovative suggestions have been made for:
- The flow label, e.g., .
- Extension headers, e.g., for segment routing or Operations, Administration,
and Maintenance (OAM) marking .
- Meaningful address bits, e.g., . Also,
segment routing uses IPv6 addresses as segment identifiers with
specific local meanings .
- If segment routing is used for network programming , IPv6 extension headers can support rather
complex local functionality.
The case of the extension header is particularly interesting, since its
existence has been a major "selling point" for IPv6, but new extension
headers are notorious for being virtually impossible to deploy across the whole Internet . It is worth noting that extension header filtering is
considered an important security issue . There is
considerable appetite among vendors or operators to have flexibility in
defining extension headers for use in limited or specialized domains,
e.g., , , and . Locally
significant hop-by-hop options are also envisaged, that would be
understood by routers inside a domain but not elsewhere, e.g., .
- Deterministic Networking (DetNet). The Deterministic Networking Architecture
and encapsulation
aim to support flows
with extremely low data loss rates and bounded latency but only
within a part of the network that is "DetNet aware". Thus, as for
Differentiated Services above, the concept of a domain is fundamental.
- Provisioning Domains (PvDs). An architecture for Multiple Provisioning
Domains has been defined to allow hosts attached
to multiple networks to learn explicit details about the services
provided by each of those networks.
- Address Scopes. For completeness, we mention that, particularly in IPv6,
some addresses have explicitly limited scope. In particular, link-local addresses
are limited to a single physical link , and
Unique Local Addresses are limited
to a somewhat loosely defined local site scope. Previously, site-local addresses
were defined, but they were obsoleted precisely because of
"the fuzzy nature of the site concept" . Multicast
addresses also have explicit scoping .
- As an application-layer example, consider streaming services
such as IPTV infrastructures that rely on standard protocols,
but for which access is not globally available.
All of these suggestions are only viable within a specified domain. Nevertheless,
all of them are clearly intended for multivendor implementation on thousands
or millions of network domains, so interoperable standardization would be
beneficial. This argument might seem irrelevant to private or proprietary
implementations, but these have a strong tendency to become de facto
standards if they succeed, so the arguments of this document still apply.
The Scope of Protocols in Limited Domains
One consequence of the deployment of limited domains in the Internet
is that some protocols will be designed, extended, or configured so that
they only work correctly between end systems in such domains. This is
to some extent encouraged by some existing standards and by the
assignment of code points for local or experimental use. In any case, it
cannot be prevented. Also, by endorsing efforts such as Service Function
Chaining, Segment Routing, and Deterministic Networking, the IETF is in
effect encouraging such deployments. Furthermore, it seems inevitable,
if the Internet of Things becomes reality, that millions of edge
networks containing completely novel types of nodes will be connected to
the Internet; each one of these edge networks will be a limited
domain.
It is therefore appropriate to discuss whether protocols or protocol
extensions should sometimes be standardized to interoperate only within
a limited-domain boundary. Such protocols would not be required to
interoperate across the Internet as a whole. Various scenarios could
then arise if there are multiple domains using the limited-domain
protocol in question:
- If a domain is split into two parts connected over the Internet
directly at the IP layer (i.e., with no tunnel encapsulating the packets), a
limited-domain protocol could be operated between those two parts regardless
of its special nature, as long as it respects standard IP formats and is not
arbitrarily blocked by firewalls. A simple example is any protocol using a
port number assigned to a specific non-IETF protocol.
Such a protocol could reasonably be described as an "inter-domain"
protocol because the Internet is transparent to it, even if it is meaningless
except in the two limited domains. This is, of course, nothing new in the
Internet architecture.
- If a limited-domain protocol does not respect standard IP formats (for
example, if it includes a non-standard IPv6 extension header), it could not be
operated between two domains connected over the Internet directly at the IP
layer.
Such a protocol could reasonably be described as an "intra-domain" protocol,
and the Internet is opaque to it.
-
If a limited-domain protocol is clearly specified to be invalid outside its
domain of origin, neither scenario A nor B applies. The only solution would be
a single virtual domain. For example, an encapsulating tunnel between two
domains could be used to create the virtual domain. Also, nodes at the domain
boundary must drop all packets using the limited-domain protocol.
-
If a limited-domain protocol has domain-specific variants, such that
implementations in different domains could not interoperate if those domains
were unified by some mechanism as in scenario C, the protocol is not
interoperable in the normal sense. If two domains using it were merged, the
protocol might fail unpredictably. A simple example is any protocol using a
port number assigned for experimental use. Related issues are discussed in
, including the complex example of
Transport MPLS.
To provide a widespread example, consider Differentiated Services
. A packet containing any value
whatsoever in the 6 bits of the Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP)
is well formed and falls into scenario A. However, because the semantics
of DSCP values are locally significant, the packet also falls into
scenario D. In fact, Differentiated Services are only interoperable
across domain boundaries if there is a corresponding agreement between
the operators; otherwise, a specific gateway function is required for
meaningful interoperability. Much more detailed discussion is
found in and .
To provide a provocative example, consider the proposal in
that the restrictions
in should be relaxed to allow IPv6 extension headers to
be inserted on the fly in IPv6 packets. If this is done in such a way that
the affected packets can never leave the specific limited domain in which they
were modified, scenario C applies. If the semantic content of the inserted
headers is locally defined, scenario D also applies. In neither case is
the Internet outside the limited domain disturbed. However, inside the
domain, nodes must understand the variant protocol. Unless it is standardized
as a formal version, with all the complexity that implies ,
the nodes must all be non-standard to the extent of understanding
the variant protocol. For the example of IPv6 header insertion, that
means non-compliance with within the domain, even if the
inserted headers are themselves fully compliant. Apart from the issue
of formal compliance, such deviations from documented standard behavior
might lead to significant debugging issues. The possible practical impact
of the header insertion example is explored in
.
The FAST proposal mentioned in
is also an interesting case study. The semantics of FAST tickets have limited scope. However,
they are designed in a way that, in principle, allows them to traverse the
open Internet, as standardized IPv6 hop-by-hop options or even as a
proposed form of IPv4 extension header . Whether such options can be used reliably across the
open Internet remains unclear .
We conclude that it is reasonable to explicitly define limited-domain protocols, either
as standards or as proprietary mechanisms, as long as they describe
which of the above scenarios apply and they clarify how the domain is defined.
As long as all relevant standards are respected outside
the domain boundary, a well-specified limited-domain protocol need not
damage the rest of the Internet. However, as described in the next section, mechanisms are
needed to support domain membership operations.
Note that this conclusion is not a recommendation to abandon the normal
goal that a standardized protocol should be global in scope and able to
interoperate across the open Internet. It is simply a recognition
that this will not always be the case.
Functional Requirements of Limited Domains
Noting that limited-domain protocols have been defined in the past,
and that others will undoubtedly be defined in the future, it is useful to consider
how a protocol can be made aware of the domain within which it operates and how
the domain boundary nodes can be identified. As the taxonomy in
shows, there are numerous aspects to a domain. However,
we can identify some generally required features and functions that would
apply partially or completely to many cases.
Today, where limited domains exist, they are essentially created by careful
configuration of boundary routers and firewalls. If a domain is
characterized by one or more address prefixes, address assignment to hosts
must also be carefully managed. This is an error-prone method, and a combination
of configuration errors and default routing can lead to unwanted traffic escaping
the domain. Our basic assumption is therefore that it should be possible for domains
to be created and managed
automatically, with minimal human configuration. We now discuss
requirements for automating domain creation and management.
First, if we drew a topology map, any given domain -- virtual or
physical -- will have a well-defined boundary between "inside" and
"outside". However, that boundary in itself has no technical meaning.
What matters in reality is whether a node is a member of the
domain and whether it is at the boundary between the domain and
the rest of the Internet. Thus, the boundary in itself does not need to
be identified, but boundary nodes face both inwards and outwards. Inside
the domain, a sending node needs to know whether it is sending to an
inside or outside destination, and a receiving node needs to know
whether a packet originated inside or outside. Also, a boundary node
needs to know which of its interfaces are inward facing or
outward facing. It is irrelevant whether the interfaces involved are
physical or virtual.
To underline that domain boundaries need to be identifiable, consider
the statement from the Deterministic Networking Problem Statement that "there is still a lack of
clarity regarding the limits of a domain where a deterministic path can
be set up". This remark can certainly be generalized.
With this perspective, we can list some general functional requirements.
An underlying assumption here is that domain membership operations should be cryptographically
secured; a domain without such security cannot be reliably protected from attack.
- Domain Identity. A domain must have a unique and verifiable identifier;
effectively, this should be a public key for the domain. Without this,
there is no way to secure domain operations and domain membership.
The holder of the corresponding private key becomes the trust anchor for the domain.
- Nesting. It must be possible for domains to be nested (see, for example, the
network-slicing example mentioned above).
- Overlapping. It must be possible for nodes and links to be in more than one domain
(see, for example, the case of PvDs mentioned above).
- Node Eligibility. It must be possible for a node to determine which domain(s)
it can potentially join and on which interface(s).
- Secure Enrollment. A node must be able to enroll in a given domain
via secure node identification and to acquire relevant security
credentials (authorization) for operations within the domain. If a
node has multiple physical or virtual interfaces, individual
enrollment for each interface may be required.
- Withdrawal. A node must be able to cancel enrollment in a given
domain.
- Dynamic Membership. Optionally, a node should be able to
temporarily leave or rejoin a domain (i.e., enrollment is persistent
but membership is intermittent).
- Role, implying authorization to perform a certain set of actions.
A node must have a verifiable role. In the simplest case,
the role choices are "interior node" and "boundary node". In a boundary
node, individual interfaces may have different roles, e.g., "inward
facing" and "outward facing".
- Peer Verification. A node must be able to verify whether another
node is a member of the domain.
- Role Verification. A node should be able to learn the verified role of another node.
In particular, it should be possible for a node to find boundary nodes (interfacing
to the Internet).
- Domain Data. In a domain with management requirements, it must
be possible for a node to acquire domain policy and/or
domain configuration data. This would include, for example, filtering policy
to ensure that inappropriate packets do not leave the domain.
These requirements could form the basis for further analysis and solution design.
Another aspect is whether individual packets within a limited domain need to
carry any sort of indicator that they belong to that domain or whether this
information will be implicit in the IP addresses of the packet. A related question
is whether individual packets need cryptographic authentication. This topic is
for further study.
Security Considerations
As noted above, a protocol intended for limited use may well be
inadvertently used on the open Internet, so limited use is not an excuse for
poor security. In fact, a limited use requirement potentially adds
complexity to the security design.
Often, the boundary of a limited domain will also act as a security boundary.
In particular, it will serve as a trust boundary and as a boundary of
authority for defining capabilities. For example, segment routing
explicitly uses the concept of a "trusted domain" in this way. Within the boundary,
limited-domain protocols or protocol features will be useful, but they will in
many cases be meaningless or harmful if they enter or leave the domain.
The boundary also serves to provide confidentiality and privacy for operational
parameters that the operator does not wish to reveal. Note that this is distinct from
privacy protection for individual users within the domain.
The security model for a limited-scope protocol must allow for the
boundary and in particular for a trust model that changes at the
boundary. Typically, credentials will need to be signed by a
domain-specific authority.
IANA Considerations
This document has no IANA actions.
Informative References
IEEE Standard for Local and metropolitan area networks - Bridges and Bridged Networks
HUAWEI - Big IP Initiative
Taxonomy of Limited Domains
This appendix develops a taxonomy for describing limited domains.
Several major aspects are considered in this taxonomy:
- The domain as a whole
- The individual nodes
- The domain boundary
- The domain's topology
- The domain's technology
- How the domain connects to the Internet
- The security, trust, and privacy model
- Operations
The following sub-sections analyze each of these aspects.
Domain as a Whole
- Why does the domain exist? (e.g., human choice, administrative policy,
orchestration requirements, technical requirements such as
operational partitioning for scaling reasons)
- If there are special requirements, are they at Layer 2,
Layer 3, or an upper layer?
- Where does the domain lie on the spectrum between completely managed by humans and completely autonomic?
- If managed, what style of management applies? (Manual configuration,
automated configuration, orchestration?)
- Is there a policy model? (Intent, configuration policies?)
- Does the domain provide controlled or paid service or open access?
Individual Nodes
- Is a domain member a complete node or only one interface of a node?
- Are nodes permanent members of a given domain, or are join and
leave operations possible?
- Are nodes physical or virtual devices?
- Are virtual nodes general purpose or limited to specific
functions, applications, or users?
- Are nodes constrained (by battery, etc.)?
- Are devices installed "out of the box" or pre-configured?
Domain Boundary
- How is the domain boundary identified or defined?
- Is the domain boundary fixed or dynamic?
- Are boundary nodes special, or can any node be at the boundary?
Topology
- Is the domain a subset of a Layer 2 or 3 connectivity domain?
- Does the domain overlap other domains? (In other words, is a
node allowed to be a member of multiple domains?)
- Does the domain match physical topology, or does it have a virtual (overlay) topology?
- Is the domain in a single building, vehicle, or campus? Or is it
distributed?
- If distributed, are the interconnections private or over the Internet?
- In IP addressing terms, is the domain Link local, Site local, or Global?
- Does the scope of IP unicast or multicast addresses map to the domain boundary?
Technology
- What routing protocol(s) or different forwarding mechanisms
(MPLS or other non-IP mechanism) are used?
- In an overlay domain, what overlay technique is used (L2VPN,
L3VPN, etc.)?
- Are there specific QoS requirements?
- Link latency - Normal or long latency links?
- Mobility - Are nodes mobile? Is the whole network mobile?
- Which specific technologies, such as those in ,
are applicable?
Connection to the Internet
- Is the Internet connection permanent or intermittent?
(Never connected is out of scope.)
- What traffic is blocked, in and out?
- What traffic is allowed, in and out?
- What traffic is transformed, in and out?
- Is secure and privileged remote access needed?
- Does the domain allow unprivileged remote sessions?
Security, Trust, and Privacy Model
- Must domain members be authorized?
- Are all nodes in the domain at the same trust level?
- Is traffic authenticated?
- Is traffic encrypted?
- What is hidden from the outside?
Operations
- Safety level - Does the domain have a critical (human) safety role?
- Reliability requirement - Normal or 99.999%?
- Environment - Hazardous conditions?
- Installation - Are specialists needed?
- Service visits - Easy, difficult, or impossible?
- Software/firmware updates - Possible or impossible?
Making Use of This Taxonomy
This taxonomy could be used to design or analyze a specific type of limited domain.
For the present document, it is intended only to form a background to the
scope of protocols used in limited domains and the mechanisms
required to securely define domain membership and properties.
Acknowledgements
Useful comments were received from
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and others.
Contributors
Huawei Technologies
Q14, Huawei Campus
No. 156 Beiqing Road
Hai-Dian District, Beijing
100095
China
jiangsheng@huawei.com