Skip to main content

Gap Analysis for IPv4 Sunset
draft-ietf-sunset4-gapanalysis-06

The information below is for an old version of the document.
Document Type
This is an older version of an Internet-Draft whose latest revision state is "Replaced".
Authors Simon Perreault , Tina Tsou (Ting ZOU) , Cathy Zhou , Peng Fan
Last updated 2015-03-25
Replaces draft-dionne-sunset4-v4gapanalysis
Replaced by draft-liu-sunset4-gapanalysis
RFC stream Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
Formats
Additional resources Mailing list discussion
Stream WG state WG Document
Document shepherd (None)
IESG IESG state I-D Exists
Consensus boilerplate Unknown
Telechat date (None)
Responsible AD (None)
Send notices to (None)
draft-ietf-sunset4-gapanalysis-06
Network Working Group                                       S. Perreault
Internet-Draft                                       Jive Communications
Intended status: Informational                                   T. Tsou
Expires: September 26, 2015                    Huawei Technologies (USA)
                                                                 C. Zhou
                                                     Huawei Technologies
                                                                  P. Fan
                                                            China Mobile
                                                          March 25, 2015

                      Gap Analysis for IPv4 Sunset
                   draft-ietf-sunset4-gapanalysis-06

Abstract

   Sunsetting IPv4 refers to the process of turning off IPv4
   definitively.  It can be seen as the final phase of the migration to
   IPv6.  This memo enumerates difficulties arising when sunsetting
   IPv4, and identifies the gaps requiring additional work.

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 September 26, 2015.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2015 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

Perreault, et al.      Expires September 26, 2015               [Page 1]
Internet-Draft          IPv4 Sunsetting Analysis              March 2015

   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  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  Related Work  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   3.  Remotely Disabling IPv4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
     3.1.  Indicating that IPv4 connectivity is unavailable  . . . .   4
     3.2.  Disabling IPv4 in the LAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   4
   4.  Client Connection Establishment Behavior  . . . . . . . . . .   4
   5.  Disabling IPv4 in Operating System and Applications . . . . .   5
   6.  On-Demand Provisioning of IPv4 Addresses  . . . . . . . . . .   5
   7.  IPv4 Address Literals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   8.  Managing Router Identifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   6
   9.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   10. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   11. Acknowledgements  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   12. Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
   Appendix A.  Solution Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     A.1.  Remotely Disabling IPv4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
       A.1.1.  Indicating that IPv4 connectivity is unavailable  . .   9
       A.1.2.  Disabling IPv4 in the LAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
     A.2.  Client Connection Establishment Behavior  . . . . . . . .  10
     A.3.  Disabling IPv4 in Operating System and Applications . . .  10
     A.4.  On-Demand Provisioning of IPv4 Addresses  . . . . . . . .  10
     A.5.  Managing Router Identifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
   Authors' Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11

1.  Introduction

   The final phase of the migration to IPv6 is the sunset of IPv4, that
   is turning off IPv4 definitively on the attached networks and on the
   upstream networks.

   Some current implementation behavior makes it hard to sunset IPv4.
   Additionally, some new features could be added to IPv4 to make its
   sunsetting easier.  This document analyzes the current situation and
   proposes new work in this area.

   The decision about when to turn off IPv4 is out of scope.  This
   document merely attempts to enumerate the issues one might encounter
   if that decision is made.

Perreault, et al.      Expires September 26, 2015               [Page 2]
Internet-Draft          IPv4 Sunsetting Analysis              March 2015

2.  Related Work

   [RFC3789], [RFC3790],[RFC3791], [RFC3792], [RFC3793], [RFC3794],
   [RFC3795] and [RFC3796] contain surveys of IETF protocols with their
   IPv4 dependencies.

   Additionally, although reviews in RFCs 3789-3796 ensured that IETF
   standards then in use could support IPv6, no IETF-wide effort has
   been undertaken to ensure that the issues identified in those drafts
   are all addressed, nor to ensure that standards written after RFC3100
   (where the previous review efforts stopped) function properly on
   IPv6-only networks.

   The IETF needs to ensure that existing standards and protocols have
   been actively reviewed, and any parity gaps either identified so that
   they can be fixed, or documented as unnecessary to address because it
   is unused or superseded by other features.

   First, the IETF must review RFCs 3789-3796 to ensure that any gaps in
   specifications identified in these documents and still in active use
   have been updated as necessary to enable operation in IPv6-only
   environments (or if no longer in use, are declared historic).

   Second, the IETF must review documents written after the existing
   review stopped (according to RFC 3790, this review stopped with
   approximately RFC 3100) to identify specifications where IPv6-only
   operation is not possible, and update them as necessary and
   appropriate, or document why an identified gap is not an issue i.e.
   not necessary for functional parity with IPv4.

   This document does not recommend excluding Informational and BCP RFCs
   as the previous effort did, due to changes in the way that these
   documents are used and their relative importance in the RFC Series.
   Instead, any documents that are still active (i.e. not declared
   historic or obsolete) and the product of IETF consensus (i.e. not a
   product of the ISE Series) should be included.  In addition, the
   reviews undertaken by RFCs 3789-3796 were looking for "IPv4
   dependency" or "usage of IPv4 addresses in standards".  This document
   recommends a slightly more specific set of criteria for review:
   review should include consideration of whether the specification can
   operate in an environment without IPv4.  Reviews should include
   guidance on the use of 32-bit identifiers that are commonly populated
   by IPv4 addresses.  Reviews should include consideration of protocols
   on which specifications depend or interact, to identify indirect
   dependencies on IPv4.  Finally, reviews should consider how to
   migrate from an IPv4 environment to an IPv6 environment.

Perreault, et al.      Expires September 26, 2015               [Page 3]
Internet-Draft          IPv4 Sunsetting Analysis              March 2015

3.  Remotely Disabling IPv4

3.1.  Indicating that IPv4 connectivity is unavailable

   PROBLEM 1:  When an IPv4 node boots and requests an IPv4 address
               (e.g., using DHCP), it typically interprets the absence
               of a response as a failure condition even when it is not.

   PROBLEM 2:  Home router devices often identify themselves as default
               routers in DHCP responses that they send to requests
               coming from the LAN, even in the absence of IPv4
               connectivity on the WAN.

3.2.  Disabling IPv4 in the LAN

   PROBLEM 3:  IPv4-enabled hosts inside an IPv6-only LAN can auto-
               configure IPv4 addresses [RFC3927] and enable various
               protocols over IPv4 such as mDNS
               [I-D.cheshire-dnsext-multicastdns] and LLMNR [RFC4795].
               This can be undesirable for operational or security
               reasons, since in the absence of IPv4, no monitoring or
               logging of IPv4 will be in place.

   PROBLEM 4:  IPv4 can be completely disabled on a link by filtering it
               on the L2 switching device.  However, this may not be
               possible in all cases or may be too complex to deploy.
               For example, an ISP is often not able to control the L2
               switching device in the subscriber home network.

   PROBLEM 5:  A host with only Link-Local IPv4 addresses will "ARP for
               everything", as described in Section 2.6.2 of [RFC3927].
               Applications running on such a host connected to an
               IPv6-only network will believe that IPv4 connectivity is
               available, resulting in various bad or sub-optimal
               behavior patterns.  See
               [I-D.yourtchenko-ipv6-disable-ipv4-proxyarp] for further
               analysis.

   Some of these problems were described in [RFC2563], which
   standardized a DHCP option to disable IPv4 address auto-
   configuration.  However, using this option requires running an IPv4
   DHCP server, which is contrary to the goal of IPv4 sunsetting.

4.  Client Connection Establishment Behavior

   PROBLEM 6:  Happy Eyeballs [RFC6555] refers to multiple approaches to
               dual-stack client implementations that try to reduce
               connection setup delays by trying both IPv4 and IPv6

Perreault, et al.      Expires September 26, 2015               [Page 4]
Internet-Draft          IPv4 Sunsetting Analysis              March 2015

               paths simultaneously.  Some implementations introduce
               delays which provide an advantage to IPv6, while others
               do not [Huston2012].  The latter will pick the fastest
               path, no matter whether it is over IPv4 or IPv6,
               directing more traffic over IPv4 than the other kind of
               implementations.  This can prove problematic in the
               context of IPv4 sunsetting, especially for Carrier-Grade
               NAT phasing out because CGN does not add significant
               latency that would make the IPv6 path more preferable.
               Traffic will therefore continue using the CGN path unless
               other network conditions change.

   PROBLEM 7:  getaddrinfo() [RFC3493] sends DNS queries for both A and
               AAAA records regardless of the state of IPv4 or IPv6
               availability.  The AI_ADDRCONFIG flag can be used to
               change this behavior, but it relies on programmers using
               the getaddrinfo() function to always pass this flag to
               the function.  The current situation is that in an
               IPv6-only environment, many useless A queries are made.

5.  Disabling IPv4 in Operating System and Applications

   It is possible to completely remove IPv4 support from an operating
   system as has been shown by the work of Bjoern Zeeb on FreeBSD.
   [Zeeb] Removing IPv4 support in the kernel revealed many IPv4
   dependencies in libraries and applications.

   PROBLEM 8:  Completely disabling IPv4 at runtime often reveals
               implementation bugs.  Hard-coded dependencies on IPv4
               abound, such as on the 127.0.0.1 address assigned to the
               loopback interface.  It is therefore often operationally
               impossible to completely disable IPv4 on individual
               nodes.

   PROBLEM 9:  In an IPv6-only world, legacy IPv4 code in operating
               systems and applications incurs a maintenance overhead
               and can present security risks.

6.  On-Demand Provisioning of IPv4 Addresses

   As IPv6 usage climbs, the usefulness of IPv4 addresses to subscribers
   will become smaller.  This could be exploited by an ISP to save IPv4
   addresses by provisioning them on-demand to subscribers and
   reclaiming them when they are no longer used.  This idea is described
   in [I-D.fleischhauer-ipv4-addr-saving] and [BBF.TR242] for the
   context of PPP sessions.  In these scenarios, the home router is
   responsible for requesting and releasing IPv4 addresses, based on

Perreault, et al.      Expires September 26, 2015               [Page 5]
Internet-Draft          IPv4 Sunsetting Analysis              March 2015

   snooping the traffic generated by the hosts in the LAN, which are
   still dual-stack and unaware that their traffic is being snooped.

   PROBLEM 10: Dual-stack hosts that implement Happy-Eyeballs [RFC6555]
               will generate both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic even if the
               algorithm end up chooosing IPv6.  This means that an IPv4
               address will always be requested by the home router,
               which defeats the purpose of on-demand provisioning.

   PROBLEM 11: Many operating systems periodically perform some kind of
               network connectivity check as long as an interface is up.
               Similarly, applications often send keep-alive traffic
               continuously.  This permanent "background noise" will
               prevent an IPv4 address from being released by the home
               router.

   PROBLEM 12: Hosts in the LAN have no knowledge that IPv4 is available
               to them on-demand only.  If they had explicit knowledge
               of this fact, they could tune their behaviour so as to be
               more conservative in their use of IPv4.

   PROBLEM 13: This mechanism is only being proposed for PPP even though
               it could apply to other provisioning protocols (e.g.,
               DHCP).

7.  IPv4 Address Literals

   IPv4 addresses are often used as resource locators.  For example, it
   is common to encounter URLs containing IPv4 address literals on web
   sites [I-D.wing-behave-http-ip-address-literals].  IPv4 address
   literals may be published on media other than web sites, and may
   appear in various forms other than URLs.  For the operating systems
   which exhibit the behavior described in
   [I-D.yourtchenko-ipv6-disable-ipv4-proxyarp], this also means an
   increase in the broadcast ARP traffic, which may be undesirable.

   PROBLEM 14: IPv6-only hosts are unable to access resources identified
               by IPv4 address literals.

8.  Managing Router Identifiers

   IPv4 addresses are often conventionally chosen to number a router ID,
   which is used to identify a system running a specific protocol.  The
   common practice of tying an ID to an IPv4 address gives much
   operational convenience.  A human-readable ID is easy for network
   operators to deal with, and it can be auto-configured, saving the
   work of planning and assignment.  It is also helpful to quickly

Perreault, et al.      Expires September 26, 2015               [Page 6]
Internet-Draft          IPv4 Sunsetting Analysis              March 2015

   perform diagnosis and troubleshooting, and easy to identify the
   availability and location of the identified router.

   PROBLEM 15: In an IPv6 only network, there is no IP address that can
               be directly used to number a router ID.  IDs have to be
               planned individually to meet the uniqueness requirement.
               Tying the ID directly to an IP address which yields
               human-friendly, auto-configured ID that helps with
               troubleshooting is not possible.

9.  IANA Considerations

   None.

10.  Security Considerations

   It is believed that none of the problems identified in this draft are
   security issues.

11.  Acknowledgements

   Thanks in particular to Andrew Yourtchenko, Lee Howard, Nejc
   Skoberne, and Wes George for their thorough reviews and comments.

   Special thanks to Marc Blanchet who was the driving force behind this
   work and to Jean-Philippe Dionne who helped with the initial version
   of this document.

12.  Informative References

   [BBF.TR242]
              Broadband Forum, "TR-242: IPv6 Transition Mechanisms for
              Broadband Networks", August 2012.

   [Huston2012]
              Huston, G. and G. Michaelson, "RIPE 64: Analysing Dual
              Stack Behaviour and IPv6 Quality", April 2012.

   [I-D.cheshire-dnsext-multicastdns]
              Cheshire, S. and M. Krochmal, "Multicast DNS", draft-
              cheshire-dnsext-multicastdns-15 (work in progress),
              December 2011.

   [I-D.fleischhauer-ipv4-addr-saving]
              Fleischhauer, K. and O. Bonness, "On demand IPv4 address
              provisioning in Dual-Stack PPP deployment scenarios",
              draft-fleischhauer-ipv4-addr-saving-03 (work in progress),
              August 2012.

Perreault, et al.      Expires September 26, 2015               [Page 7]
Internet-Draft          IPv4 Sunsetting Analysis              March 2015

   [I-D.wing-behave-http-ip-address-literals]
              Wing, D., "Coping with IP Address Literals in HTTP URIs
              with IPv6/IPv4 Translators", draft-wing-behave-http-ip-
              address-literals-02 (work in progress), March 2010.

   [I-D.yourtchenko-ipv6-disable-ipv4-proxyarp]
              Yourtchenko, A. and O. Owen, "Disable "Proxy ARP for
              Everything" on IPv4 link-local in the presence of IPv6
              global address", draft-yourtchenko-ipv6-disable-
              ipv4-proxyarp-00 (work in progress), May 2013.

   [RFC2563]  Troll, R., "DHCP Option to Disable Stateless Auto-
              Configuration in IPv4 Clients", RFC 2563, May 1999.

   [RFC3493]  Gilligan, R., Thomson, S., Bound, J., McCann, J., and W.
              Stevens, "Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6", RFC
              3493, February 2003.

   [RFC3789]  Nesser, P. and A. Bergstrom, "Introduction to the Survey
              of IPv4 Addresses in Currently Deployed IETF Standards
              Track and Experimental Documents", RFC 3789, June 2004.

   [RFC3790]  Mickles, C. and P. Nesser, "Survey of IPv4 Addresses in
              Currently Deployed IETF Internet Area Standards Track and
              Experimental Documents", RFC 3790, June 2004.

   [RFC3791]  Olvera, C. and P. Nesser, "Survey of IPv4 Addresses in
              Currently Deployed IETF Routing Area Standards Track and
              Experimental Documents", RFC 3791, June 2004.

   [RFC3792]  Nesser, P. and A. Bergstrom, "Survey of IPv4 Addresses in
              Currently Deployed IETF Security Area Standards Track and
              Experimental Documents", RFC 3792, June 2004.

   [RFC3793]  Nesser, P. and A. Bergstrom, "Survey of IPv4 Addresses in
              Currently Deployed IETF Sub-IP Area Standards Track and
              Experimental Documents", RFC 3793, June 2004.

   [RFC3794]  Nesser, P. and A. Bergstrom, "Survey of IPv4 Addresses in
              Currently Deployed IETF Transport Area Standards Track and
              Experimental Documents", RFC 3794, June 2004.

   [RFC3795]  Sofia, R. and P. Nesser, "Survey of IPv4 Addresses in
              Currently Deployed IETF Application Area Standards Track
              and Experimental Documents", RFC 3795, June 2004.

Perreault, et al.      Expires September 26, 2015               [Page 8]
Internet-Draft          IPv4 Sunsetting Analysis              March 2015

   [RFC3796]  Nesser, P. and A. Bergstrom, "Survey of IPv4 Addresses in
              Currently Deployed IETF Operations & Management Area
              Standards Track and Experimental Documents", RFC 3796,
              June 2004.

   [RFC3927]  Cheshire, S., Aboba, B., and E. Guttman, "Dynamic
              Configuration of IPv4 Link-Local Addresses", RFC 3927, May
              2005.

   [RFC4795]  Aboba, B., Thaler, D., and L. Esibov, "Link-local
              Multicast Name Resolution (LLMNR)", RFC 4795, January
              2007.

   [RFC6555]  Wing, D. and A. Yourtchenko, "Happy Eyeballs: Success with
              Dual-Stack Hosts", RFC 6555, April 2012.

   [Zeeb]     "FreeBSD Snapshots without IPv4 support",
              <http://wiki.freebsd.org/IPv6Only>.

Appendix A.  Solution Ideas

A.1.  Remotely Disabling IPv4

A.1.1.  Indicating that IPv4 connectivity is unavailable

   One way to address these issues is to send a signal to a dual-stack
   node that IPv4 connectivity is unavailable.  Given that IPv4 shall be
   off, the message must be delivered through IPv6.

A.1.2.  Disabling IPv4 in the LAN

   One way to address these issues is to send a signal to a dual-stack
   node that auto-configuration of IPv4 addresses is undesirable, or
   that direct IPv4 communication between nodes on the same link should
   not take place.

   A signalling protocol equivalent to the one from [RFC2563] but over
   IPv6 is necessary, using either Router Advertisements or DHCPv6.

   Furthermore, it could be useful to have L2 switches snoop this
   signalling and automatically start filtering IPv4 traffic as a
   consequence.

   Finally, it could be useful to publish guidelines on how to safely
   block IPv4 on an L2 switch.

Perreault, et al.      Expires September 26, 2015               [Page 9]
Internet-Draft          IPv4 Sunsetting Analysis              March 2015

A.2.  Client Connection Establishment Behavior

   Recommendations on client connection establishment behavior that
   would facilitate IPv4 sunsetting would be appropriate.

A.3.  Disabling IPv4 in Operating System and Applications

   It would be useful for the IETF to provide guidelines to programmers
   on how to avoid creating dependencies on IPv4, how to discover
   existing dependencies, and how to eliminate them.  Having programs
   and operating systems that behave well in an IPv6-only environment is
   a prerequisite for IPv4 sunsetting.

A.4.  On-Demand Provisioning of IPv4 Addresses

   No idea.

A.5.  Managing Router Identifiers

   Router IDs can be manually planned, possibly with some hierarchy or
   design rule, or can be created automatically.  A simple way of
   automatic creation is to generate pseudo-random numbers, and one can
   use another source of data such as the clock time at boot or
   configuration time to provide additional entropy during the
   generation of unique IDs.  Another way is to hash an IPv6 address
   down to a value as ID.  The hash algorithm is supposed to be known
   and the same across the domain.  Since typically the number of
   routers in a domain is far smaller than the value range of IDs, the
   hashed IDs are hardly likely to conflict with each other, as long as
   the hash algorithm is not designed too badly.  It is necessary to be
   able to override the automatically created value, and desirable if
   the mechanism is provided by the system implementation.

   If the ID is created from IPv6 address, e.g. by hashing from an IPv6
   address, then naturally it has relationship with the address.  If the
   ID is created regardless of IP address, one way to build association
   with IPv6 address is to embed the ID into an IPv6 address that is to
   be configured on the router, e.g. use a /96 IPv6 prefix and append it
   with a 32-bit long ID.  One can also use some record keeping
   mechanisms, e.g. text file, DNS or other provisioning system like
   network management system to manage the IDs and mapping relations
   with IPv6 addresses, though extra record keeping does introduce
   additional work.

Perreault, et al.      Expires September 26, 2015              [Page 10]
Internet-Draft          IPv4 Sunsetting Analysis              March 2015

Authors' Addresses

   Simon Perreault
   Jive Communications
   Quebec, QC
   Canada

   Email: sperreault@jive.com

   Tina Tsou
   Huawei Technologies (USA)
   2330 Central Expressway
   Santa Clara, CA  95050
   USA

   Phone: +1 408 330 4424
   Email: tina.tsou.zouting@huawei.com

   Cathy Zhou
   Huawei Technologies
   Huawei Industrial Base
   Bantian, Shenzhen
   China

   Email: cathy.zhou@huawei.com

   Peng Fan
   China Mobile
   32 Xuanwumen West Street
   Beijing, Beijing
   China

   Email: fanp08@gmail.com

Perreault, et al.      Expires September 26, 2015              [Page 11]