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UDP Checksums for Tunneled Packets
draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums-04

The information below is for an old version of the document.
Document Type
This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 6935.
Authors Marshall Eubanks , Phil Chimento , Magnus Westerlund
Last updated 2012-10-11 (Latest revision 2012-09-05)
RFC stream Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
Formats
Reviews
Additional resources Mailing list discussion
Stream WG state Submitted to IESG for Publication
Document shepherd Ole Trøan
Shepherd write-up Show Last changed 2012-09-13
IESG IESG state Became RFC 6935 (Proposed Standard)
Consensus boilerplate Unknown
Telechat date (None)
Needs a YES. Needs 10 more YES or NO OBJECTION positions to pass.
Responsible AD Brian Haberman
Send notices to 6man-chairs@tools.ietf.org, draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums@tools.ietf.org, ipv6@ietf.org
draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums-04
Network Working Group                                         M. Eubanks
Internet-Draft                                        AmericaFree.TV LLC
Updates: 2460 (if approved)                                  P. Chimento
Intended status: Standards Track        Johns Hopkins University Applied
Expires: March 9, 2013                                Physics Laboratory
                                                           M. Westerlund
                                                                Ericsson
                                                       September 5, 2012

                   UDP Checksums for Tunneled Packets
                    draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums-04

Abstract

   This document provides an update of the Internet Protocol version 6
   (IPv6) specification (RFC2460) to improve the performance of IPv6 in
   the use case when a tunnel protocol uses UDP with IPv6 to tunnel
   packets.  The performance improvement is obtained by relaxing the
   IPv6 UDP checksum requirement for suitable tunneling protocol where
   header information is protected on the "inner" packet being carried.
   This relaxation removes the overhead associated with the computation
   of UDP checksums on IPv6 packets used to carry tunnel protocols and
   thereby improves the efficiency of the traversal of firewalls and
   other network middleboxes by such protocols.  We describe how the
   IPv6 UDP checksum requirement can be relaxed in the situation where
   the encapsulated packet itself contains a checksum, the limitations
   and risks of this approach, and defines restrictions on the use of
   this relaxation to mitigate these risks.

Status of this Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on March 9, 2013.

Copyright Notice

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   Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document.  Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document.  Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   2.  Some Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
     2.1.  Requirements Language  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   3.  Problem Statement  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   4.  Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   5.  The Zero-Checksum Update . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
   6.  Additional Observations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
   7.  IANA Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
   8.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
   9.  Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
   10. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
     10.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
     10.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
   Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

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1.  Introduction

   This work constitutes an update of the Internet Protocol Version 6
   (IPv6) Specification [RFC2460], in the use case when a tunnel
   protocol uses UDP with IPv6 to tunnel packets.  With the rapid growth
   of the Internet, tunneling protocols have become increasingly
   important to enable the deployment of new protocols.  Tunneled
   protocols can be deployed rapidly, while the time to upgrade and
   deploy a critical mass of routers, switches and end hosts on the
   global Internet for a new protocol is now measured in decades.  At
   the same time, the increasing use of firewalls and other security
   related middleboxes means that truly new tunnel protocols, with new
   protocol numbers, are also unlikely to be deployable in a reasonable
   time frame, which has resulted in an increasing interest in and use
   of UDP-based tunneling protocols.  In such protocols, there is an
   encapsulated "inner" packet, and the "outer" packet carrying the
   tunneled inner packet is a UDP packet, which can pass through
   firewalls and other middleboxes filtering that is a fact of life on
   the current Internet.

   Tunnel endpoints may be routers or middleboxes aggregating traffic
   from a large number of tunnel users, therefore the computation of an
   additional checksum on the outer UDP packet, may be seen as an
   unwarranted burden on nodes that implement a tunneling protocol,
   especially if the inner packet(s) are already protected by a
   checksum.  In IPv4, there is a checksum on the IP packet itself, and
   the checksum on the outer UDP packet can be set to zero.  However in
   IPv6 there is not a checksum on the IP packet and RFC 2460 [RFC2460]
   explicitly states that IPv6 receivers MUST discard UDP packets with a
   zero checksum.  So, while sending a UDP packet with a zero checksum
   is permitted in IPv4 packets, it is explicitly forbidden in IPv6
   packets.  To improve support for IPv6 UDP tunnels, this document
   updates RFC 2460 to allow tunnel endpoints to use a zero UDP checksum
   under constrained situations (IPv6 tunnel transports that carry
   checksum-protected packets), following the considerations in
   [I-D.ietf-6man-udpzero].

   Unicast UDP Usage Guidelines for Application Designers [RFC5405]
   should be consulted when reading this specification.  It discusses
   both UDP tunnels (Section 3.1.3) and the usage of Checksums (Section
   3.4).

   While the origin of this specification is the problem raised by the
   draft titled "Automatic IP Multicast Without Explicit Tunnels", also
   known as "AMT," [I-D.ietf-mboned-auto-multicast] we expect it to have
   wide applicability.  Since the first version of this document, the
   need for an efficient UDP tunneling mechanism has increased.  Other
   IETF Working Groups, notably LISP [I-D.ietf-lisp] and Softwires

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   [RFC5619] have expressed a need to update the UDP checksum processing
   in RFC 2460.  We therefore expect this update to be applicable in
   future to other tunneling protocols specified by these and other IETF
   Working Groups.

2.  Some Terminology

   For the remainder of this document, we discuss only IPv6, since this
   problem does not exist for IPv4.  Therefore all reference to 'IP'
   should be understood as a reference to IPv6.

   The document uses the terms "tunneling" and "tunneled" as adjectives
   when describing packets.  When we refer to 'tunneling packets' we
   refer to the outer packet header that provides the tunneling
   function.  When we refer to 'tunneled packets' we refer to the inner
   packet, i.e. the packet being carried in the tunnel.

2.1.  Requirements Language

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].

3.  Problem Statement

   This document provides an update for the case where a tunnel protocol
   transports tunnelled packets that already have a UDP header with a
   checksum, there is both a benefit and a cost to compute and check the
   UDP checksum of the outer (encapsulating) UDP transport header.  In
   certain cases, where reducing the forwarding cost is important, such
   as for systems that perform the check in software, the cost may
   outweigh the benefit; this document describes a means to avoid that
   cost, in the case where there is an inner header with a checksum.

4.  Discussion

   IPv6 UDP Checksum Considerations [I-D.ietf-6man-udpzero] describes
   the issues related to allowing UDP over IPv6 to have a valid checksum
   of zero and is not repeated here.

   Section 5.1 of [I-D.ietf-6man-udpzero], identifies 9 requirements
   that introduce constraints on the usage of a zero checksum for UDP
   over IPv6.  This document is intended to satisfy these requirements.

   [I-D.ietf-6man-udpzero] and mailing list discussions have noted there

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   is still the possibility of deep-inspection firewall devices or other
   middleboxes checking the UDP checksum field of the outer packet and
   thereby discarding the tunneling packets.  This would be an issue
   also for any legacy IPv6 system that has not implemented this update
   to the IPv6 specification.  In this case, the system (according to
   RFC 2460) will discard the zero-checksum UDP packets, and should log
   this as an error.

   The below discuss how path errors can be detected and handled in an
   UDP tunneling protocol when the checksum protection is disabled.
   Note that other (non-tunneling) protocols may have different
   approaches, but these are not the topic of this update.  We propose
   the following approach to handle this problem:

   o  Context (i.e. tunneling state) should be established via
      application Protocol Data Units (PDUs) that are carried in
      checksummed UDP packets.  That is, any control packets flowing
      between the tunnel endpoints should be protected by UDP checksums.
      The control packets can also contain any negotiation required to
      enable the endpoint/adapters to accept UDP packets with a zero
      checksum.  The control packets may also carry any negotiation
      required to enable the endpoint/adapters to identify the set of
      ports that need to enable reception UDP datagrams with a zero
      checksum.

   o  A system shall not set the UDP checksum to zero in packets that do
      not contain tunneled packets.

   o  UDP keep-alive packets with checksum zero can be sent to validate
      paths, given that paths between tunnel endpoints can change and so
      middleboxes in the path may vary during the life of the
      association.  Paths with middleboxes that are intolerant of a UDP
      checksum of zero will drop the keep-alives and the endpoints will
      discover that.  Note that this need only be done per tunnel
      endpoint pair, not per tunnel context.  Keep-alive traffic should
      include both packets with tunnel checksums and packets with
      checksums equal to zero to enable the remote end to distinguish
      between path failures and the blockage of packets with checksum
      equal to zero.

   o  Corruption of the encapsulating IPv6 source address, destination
      address and/or the UDP source port, destination port fields : If
      the 9 restrictions in [I-D.ietf-6man-udpzero] are followed, the
      inner packets (tunneled packets) should be protected and run the
      usual (presumably small) risk of having undetected corruption(s).
      If tunneling protocol contexts contain (at a minimum) source and
      destination IP addresses and source and destination ports, there
      are 16 possible corruption outcomes.  We note that these outcomes

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      are not equally likely.  The possible corruption outcomes may be:

      *  Half of the 16 possible corruption combinations have a
         corrupted destination address.  If the incorrect destination is
         reached and the node doesn't have an application for the
         destination port, the packet will be dropped.  If the
         application at the incorrect destination is the same tunneling
         protocol and if it has a matching context (which can be assumed
         to be a very low probability event) the inner packet will be
         decapsulated and forwarded.  Application developers should
         verify the context of the packets they receive using UDP, as
         described in [RFC5405].  Applications that verify the context
         of a datagram are expected to have a high probability of
         discarding corrupted data.  [I-D.ietf-6man-udpzero] presents
         examples of cases where corruption can inadvertently impact
         application state.

      *  Half of the 8 possible corruption combinations with a correct
         destination address have a corrupted source address.  If the
         tunnel contexts contain all elements of the address-port
         4-tuple, then the likelihood is that this corruption will be
         detected.

      *  Of the remaining 4 possibilities, with valid source and
         destination IPv6 addresses, 1 has all 4 fields valid, the other
         three have one or both ports corrupted.  Again, if the
         tunneling endpoint context contains sufficient information,
         these error should be detected with high probability.

   o  Corruption of source-fragmented encapsulating packets: In this
      case, a tunneling protocol may reassemble fragments associated
      with the wrong context at the right tunnel endpoint, or it may
      reassemble fragments associated with a context at the wrong tunnel
      endpoint, or corrupted fragments may be reassembled at the right
      context at the right tunnel endpoint.  In each of these cases, the
      IPv6 length of the encapsulating header may be checked (though
      [I-D.ietf-6man-udpzero] points out the weakness in this check).
      In addition, if the encapsulated packet is protected by a
      transport (or other) checksum, these errors can be detected (with
      some probability).

   While they do not guarantee correctness, these mechanism can reduce
   the risks of relaxing the UDP checksum requirement for IPv6.

5.  The Zero-Checksum Update

   This specification updates IPv6 to allow a UDP checksum of zero for

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   the outer encapsulating packet of a tunneling protocol.  UDP
   endpoints that implement this update MUST change their behavior for
   any destination port explicitly configured for zero checksum and not
   discard UDP packets received with a checksum value of zero on the
   outer packet.  When this is done, it requires the constraints in
   Section 5.1 of [I-D.ietf-6man-udpzero].

   Specifically, the text in [RFC2460] Section 8.1, 4th bullet is
   updated.  We refer to the following text:

   "Unlike IPv4, when UDP packets are originated by an IPv6 node, the
   UDP checksum is not optional.  That is, whenever originating a UDP
   packet, an IPv6 node must compute a UDP checksum over the packet and
   the pseudo-header, and, if that computation yields a result of zero,
   it must be changed to hex FFFF for placement in the UDP header.  IPv6
   receivers must discard UDP packets containing a zero checksum, and
   should log the error."

   This item should be taken out of the bullet list and should be
   replaced by:

      Whenever originating a UDP packet, an IPv6 node SHOULD compute a
      UDP checksum over the packet and the pseudo-header, and, if that
      computation yields a result of zero, it must be changed to hex
      FFFF for placement in the UDP header.  IPv6 receivers SHOULD
      discard UDP packets containing a zero checksum, and SHOULD log the
      error.  However, some protocols, such as tunneling protocols that
      use UDP as a tunnel encapsulation, MAY omit computing the UDP
      checksum of the encapsulating UDP header and set it to zero,
      subject to the constraints described in RFCXXXX.  In cases where
      the encapsulating protocol uses a zero checksum for UDP, the
      receiver of packets sent to a port enabled to receive zero-
      checksum packets MUST NOT discard packets solely for having a UDP
      checksum of zero.  Note that these constraints apply only to
      encapsulating protocols that omit calculating the UDP checksum and
      set it to zero.  An encapsulating protocol can always choose to
      compute the UDP checksum, in which case, its behavior is not
      updated and uses the method specified in RFC2460.

      1.  IPv6 protocol stack implementations SHOULD NOT by default
          allow the new method.  The default node receiver behavior MUST
          discard all IPv6 packets carrying UDP packets with a zero
          checksum.

      2.  Implementations MUST provide a way to signal the set of ports
          that will be enabled to receive UDP datagrams with a zero

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          checksum.  An IPv6 node that enables reception of UDP packets
          with a zero-checksum, MUST enable this only for a specific
          port or port-range.  This may be implemented via a socket API
          call, or similar mechanism.

      3.  RFC 2460 specifies that IPv6 nodes should log UDP datagrams
          with a zero-checksum.  A port for which zero-checksum has been
          enabled MUST NOT log zero-checksum datagrams for that reason
          (of course, there might be other reasons to log such packets).

      4.  A stack may separately identify UDP datagrams that are
          discarded with a zero checksum.  It SHOULD NOT add these to
          the standard log, since the endpoint has not been verified.

      5.  UDP Tunnels that encapsulate IP MAY rely on the inner packet
          integrity checks provided that the tunnel will not
          significantly increase the rate of corruption of the inner IP
          packet.  If a significantly increased corruption rate can
          occur, then the tunnel MUST provide an additional integrity
          verification mechanism.  An integrity mechanism is always
          recommended at the tunnel layer to ensure that corruption
          rates of the inner most packet are not increased.

      6.  Tunnels that encapsulate Non-IP packets MUST have a CRC or
          other mechanism for checking packet integrity, unless the
          Non-IP packet specifically is designed for transmission over
          lower layers that do not provide any packet integrity
          guarantee.  In particular, the application must be designed so
          that corruption of this information does not result in
          accumulated state or incorrect processing of a tunneled
          payload.

      7.  UDP applications that support use of a zero-checksum, SHOULD
          NOT rely upon correct reception of the IP and UDP protocol
          information (including the length of the packet) when decoding
          and processing the packet payload.  In particular, the
          application must be designed so that corruption of this
          information does not result in accumulated state or incorrect
          processing of a tunneled payload.

      8.  If a method proposes recursive tunnels, it MUST provide
          guidance that is appropriate for all use-cases.  Restrictions
          may be needed to the use of a tunnel encapsulations and the
          use of recursive tunnels (e.g.  Necessary when the endpoint is
          not verified).

      9.  IPv6 nodes that receive ICMPv6 messages that refer to packets
          with a zero UDP checksum MUST provide appropriate checks

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          concerning the consistency of the reported packet to verify
          that the reported packet actually originated from the node,
          before acting upon the information (e.g. validating the
          address and port numbers in the ICMPv6 message body).

      Middleboxes MUST allow IPv6 packets with UDP checksum equal to
      zero to pass.  Implementations of middleboxes MAY allow
      configuration of specific port ranges for which a zero UDP
      checksum is valid and may drop IPv6 UDP packets outside those
      ranges.

      The path between tunnel endpoints can change, thus also the
      middleboxes in the path may vary during the life of the
      association.  Paths with middleboxes that are intolerant of a UDP
      checksum of zero will drop any keep-alives sent to validate the
      path using checksum zero and the endpoints will discover that.
      Therefore keep-alive traffic SHOULD include both packets with
      tunnel checksums and packets with checksums equal to zero to
      enable the remote end to distinguish between path failures and the
      blockage of packets with checksum equal to zero.  Note that path
      validation need only be done per tunnel endpoint pair, not per
      tunnel context.

      RFC-Editor Note: Please replace RFCXXXX above with the RFC number
      this specification receives and remove this note.

6.  Additional Observations

   The existence of this issue among a significant number of protocols
   being developed in the IETF motivates this specified change.  The
   authors would also like to make the following observations:

   o  An empirically-based analysis of the probabilities of packet
      corruptions (with or without checksums) has not (to our knowledge)
      been conducted since about 2000.  It is now 2012.  We strongly
      suggest that an empirical study is in order, along with an
      extensive analysis of IPv6 header corruption probabilities.

   o  A key cause to the increased usage of UDP in tunneling is the lack
      of protocol support in middleboxes.  Specifically, new protocols,
      such as LISP [I-D.ietf-lisp], prefer to use UDP tunnels to
      traverse an end-to-end path successfully and avoid having their
      packets dropped by middleboxes.  If this were not the case, the
      use of UDP-lite [RFC3828] might become more viable for some (but
      not necessarily all) tunneling protocols.

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   o  Another issue is that the UDP checksum is overloaded with the task
      of protecting the IPv6 header for UDP flows (as is the TCP
      checksum for TCP flows).  Protocols that do not use a pseudo-
      header approach to computing a checksum or CRC have essentially no
      protection from mis-delivered packets.

7.  IANA Considerations

   This document makes no request of IANA.

   Note to RFC Editor: this section may be removed on publication as an
   RFC.

8.  Security Considerations

   It requires less work to generate zero-checksum attack packets than
   ones with full UDP checksums.  However, this does not lead to any
   significant new vulnerabilities as checksums are not a security
   measure and can be easily generated by any attacker, as properly
   configured tunnels should check the validity of the inner packet and
   perform any needed security checks, regardless of the checksum
   status, and finally as most attacks are generated from compromised
   hosts which automatically create checksummed packets (in other words,
   it would generally be more, not less, effort for most attackers to
   generate zero UDP checksums on the host).

9.  Acknowledgements

   We would like to thank Brian Haberman and Gorry Fairhurst for
   discussions and reviews.

10.  References

10.1.  Normative References

   [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
              Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [RFC2460]  Deering, S. and R. Hinden, "Internet Protocol, Version 6
              (IPv6) Specification", RFC 2460, December 1998.

   [RFC3828]  Larzon, L-A., Degermark, M., Pink, S., Jonsson, L-E., and
              G. Fairhurst, "The Lightweight User Datagram Protocol
              (UDP-Lite)", RFC 3828, July 2004.

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   [RFC5619]  Yamamoto, S., Williams, C., Yokota, H., and F. Parent,
              "Softwire Security Analysis and Requirements", RFC 5619,
              August 2009.

10.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.ietf-6man-udpzero]
              Fairhurst, G. and M. Westerlund, "IPv6 UDP Checksum
              Considerations", draft-ietf-6man-udpzero-06 (work in
              progress), June 2012.

   [I-D.ietf-lisp]
              Farinacci, D., Fuller, V., Meyer, D., and D. Lewis,
              "Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP)",
              draft-ietf-lisp-23 (work in progress), May 2012.

   [I-D.ietf-mboned-auto-multicast]
              Bumgardner, G., "Automatic Multicast Tunneling",
              draft-ietf-mboned-auto-multicast-14 (work in progress),
              June 2012.

   [RFC5405]  Eggert, L. and G. Fairhurst, "Unicast UDP Usage Guidelines
              for Application Designers", BCP 145, RFC 5405,
              November 2008.

Authors' Addresses

   Marshall Eubanks
   AmericaFree.TV LLC
   P.O. Box 141
   Clifton, Virginia  20124
   USA

   Phone: +1-703-501-4376
   Fax:
   Email: marshall.eubanks@gmail.com

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   P.F. Chimento
   Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
   11100 Johns Hopkins Road
   Laurel, MD  20723
   USA

   Phone: +1-443-778-1743
   Fax:
   Email: Philip.Chimento@jhuapl.edu
   URI:

   Magnus Westerlund
   Ericsson
   Farogatan 6
   SE-164 80 Kista
   Sweden

   Phone: +46 10 714 82 87
   Email: magnus.westerlund@ericsson.com

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