Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) S. Amante
Request for Comments: 6437 Level 3
Obsoletes: 3697 B. Carpenter
Updates: 2205, 2460 Univ. of Auckland
Category: Standards Track S. Jiang
ISSN: 2070-1721 Huawei
J. Rajahalme
Nokia Siemens Networks
November 2011
IPv6 Flow Label Specification
Abstract
This document specifies the IPv6 Flow Label field and the minimum
requirements for IPv6 nodes labeling flows, IPv6 nodes forwarding
labeled packets, and flow state establishment methods. Even when
mentioned as examples of possible uses of the flow labeling, more
detailed requirements for specific use cases are out of the scope for
this document.
The usage of the Flow Label field enables efficient IPv6 flow
classification based only on IPv6 main header fields in fixed
positions.
Status of This Memo
This is an Internet Standards Track document.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has
received public review and has been approved for publication by the
Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on
Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6437.
Amante, et al. Standards Track [Page 1]
RFC 6437 IPv6 Flow Label Specification November 2011
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2011 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
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described in the Simplified BSD License.
This document may contain material from IETF Documents or IETF
Contributions published or made publicly available before November
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material may not have granted the IETF Trust the right to allow
modifications of such material outside the IETF Standards Process.
Without obtaining an adequate license from the person(s) controlling
the copyright in such materials, this document may not be modified
outside the IETF Standards Process, and derivative works of it may
not be created outside the IETF Standards Process, except to format
it for publication as an RFC or to translate it into languages other
than English.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. IPv6 Flow Label Specification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Flow Labeling Requirements in the Stateless Scenario . . . . . 5
4. Flow State Establishment Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
5. Essential Correction to RFC 2205 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6.1. Covert Channel Risk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6.2. Theft and Denial of Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
6.3. IPsec and Tunneling Interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6.4. Security Filtering Interactions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
7. Differences from RFC 3697 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
8. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
9. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
9.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
9.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Appendix A. Example 20-Bit Hash Function . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Amante, et al. Standards Track [Page 2]
RFC 6437 IPv6 Flow Label Specification November 2011
1. Introduction
From the viewpoint of the network layer, a flow is a sequence of
datatracker.ietf.org