GEORIV T. Hardie
Internet-Draft Qualcomm, Inc.
Intended status: Standards Track J. Peterson
Expires: January 4, 2009 NeuStar, Inc.
J. Morris
Center for Democracy and
Technology
July 3, 2008
Implications of <retransmission-allowed> for SIP Location Conveyance
draft-ietf-geopriv-sip-lo-retransmission-00.txt
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Abstract
This document explores an ambiguity in the interpretation of the
<retransmission-allowed> element of the Presence Information Data
Format for Location Objects (PIDF-LO) in cases where PIDF-LO is
conveyed by the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). It provides
recommendations for how the SIP location conveyance mechanism should
adapt to these ambiguities.
Documents standardizing the SIP location conveyance mechanisms will
be standards-track documents processed according to the usual SIP
process. This document is intended primarily to provide the SIP
working group with a statement of the consensus of the GEOPRIV
working group on this topic. It secondarily provides tutorial
information on the problem space for the general reader.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Problem Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Recommendation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.1. Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.2. Core Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.3. Limiting Access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.3.1. Limiting access using public-key encryption . . . . . 7
3.3.2. Limiting access using Location-by-Reference . . . . . 8
3.3.3. Refraining from including location . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.4. Choosing among the available mechanisms . . . . . . . . . 10
3.5. Indicating permission to use location-based routing in
SIP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.6. Behavior of Back-to-Back User Agents . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
7. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . . . . 17
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1. Introduction
The Presence Information Data Format for Location Objects (PIDF-LO
[4] carries both location information (LI) and policy information set
by the Rule Maker, as is stipulated in [3]. The policy carried along
with LI allows the Rule Maker to restrict, among other things, the
duration for which LI will be retained by recipients and the
redistribution of LI by recipients.
The Session Initiation Protocol [2] is one proposed Using Protocol
for PIDF-LO. The conveyance of PIDF-LO within SIP is specified in
[1]. The common motivation for providing LI in SIP is to allow
location to be considered in routing the SIP message. One example
use case would be emergency services, in which the location will be
used by dispatchers to direct the response. Another use case might
be providing location to be used by services associated with the SIP
session; a location associated with a call to a taxi service, for
example, might be used to route to a local franchisee of a national
service and also to route the taxi to pick up the caller.
Some ambiguities have arisen in the interpretation of Rule Maker
policy when PIDF-LO is conveyed by SIP. The following sections
explore the problem and provide a recommendation.
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2. Problem Statement
The <retransmission-allowed> element of RFC4119 was designed for use
in an environment like that of Section 4 of RFC3693, in which
Location Information (LI) propagates from a Location Generator
through a Location Server to a Location Recipient. In this
architecture, it is the responsibility of the Location Server to act
on the rules (policy) governing access control to LI, which are in
turn set by the Rule Maker. The most important of these
responsibilities is delivering LI to authorized Location Recipients
and denying it to others. Internal to RFC4119-compliant location
objects (LOs) are additional privacy rules which are intended to
constrain Location Recipients. These include the <retransmission-
allowed> element. This element is intended to prevent a
compromise of privacy when an authorized recipient of LI shares that
LI with third-party entities, principally those who are not
authorized by the Rule Maker to receive LI. For example, a user
might be willing to share their LI with a pizza shop, but they might
not want that pizza shop to sell their LI to a targeted advertising
company that will contact the user with coupons for a nearby hair
salon.
Bear in mind, however, that <retransmission-allowed> is not intended
to provide any protocol-level mechanism to prevent unauthorized
parties from learning location through means like eavesdropping. It
is merely a way to express the preferences of the Rule Maker to the
LR. If the LR were, for example, legally bound to follow the privacy
preferences expressed by Rule Makers, then they might incur liability
of they ignored the <retransmission-allowed> parameter. No further
privacy protection is assumed to be provided by <retransmission-
allowed>.
There is a use case for LI that involves embedding it in a SIP
request that will potentially traverse multiple SIP intermediaries
before arriving at a UAS. In this use case, one or more
intermediaries might inspect the LI in order to make a SIP routing
decision; we will hereafter refer to this as location-based routing.
Common examples could include emergency services and other more
mundane cases where the originator of a SIP request wants to reach a
service in proximity to a particular geographic location, such as
contacting a nearby pizza shop. In both such cases the UAC may
intend for selected intermediaries and the UAS to have access to the
LI. In the pizza case, for instance, the UAC shares an address both
for location-based routing and additionally so that the pizza shop
reached by that routing has the address to which a pizza should be
sent.
This location-based routing use case for LI has a number of important
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disconnects from the RFC3693 model. Unlike the RFC3693 model, there
is no LS designating to which specific entities LI will be sent.
There may be multiple intermediaries between the UAC and UAS, some of
which need or want to inspect LI (which would seem to qualify them as
LRs) and some of them will not. While SIP proxy servers generally
are not RFC4119-aware and do not need to inspect SIP request bodies
in order to perform their function, nothing precludes proxy servers
inspecting or logging any SIP message bodies, including LI.
Furthermore, it is very difficult for the UAC to anticipate which
intermediaries and which eventual UAS a SIP request might reach.
This architecture is further complicated by the possibility of
sending location information by-reference, that is, placing a URL
where LI can be retrieved in SIP requests instead of using a PIDF-LO
body (commonly called including the PIDF-LO by value) Depending on
the qualities of a reference, further authorization checks may be
performed before LI is retrieved, LI may be customized depending on
who is asking, and so forth. As will be discussed in greater detail
below, the conveyance of a reference may have very different privacy
properties than conveying a PIDF-LO body by-value in a SIP request.
In this architecture, the question of who is an "authorized
recipient" from the point of view of the Rule Maker has been muddy.
The SIP elements along the path are authorized to receive and forward
the SIP message; does that make them automatically authorized
recipients of the LI it contains? The final target of the SIP
message will receive the LI along with other information, but it may
be different than the initial target in a variety of scenarios; is it
authorized to read the LI?
These questions and concerns are particularly problematic when
<retransmission-allowed> is set to "no" (the default case). This
core concern might be put as "to whom does <retransmission-allowed>
apply in location-based routing?" More specifically:
Is any entity that reads LI bound by <retransmission-allowed>? If
so, does that mean a proxy that performs location-based routing is
unable to forward a request and complete a SIP call if
<retransmission-allowed> is "no"? Alternatively, must they strip the
location body from the message in order to complete the call?
If the proxy does not understand RFC4119, it may forward a SIP
message containing a policy statement <retransmission-allowed> set to
"no". Is any proxy that does understand RFC4119 required to parse
the LI for this statement, even if it would not do so in order to
route the message?
Is there a need for SIP-level indications regarding retransmission
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for the benefit of entities that do not understand 4119?
Since the UAC cannot anticipate who may receive a SIP request, how do
we understand who the intended LR is in the location-based routing
case? Can a UAC have intended for there to be multiple serial LRs in
a transmission? If so, if one LR is authorized to retransmit to
another LR, how will it know it is not also authorized to transmit LI
to other third parties (i.e., how will the serial LRs know to whom
they are authorized to retransmit)? How could all of this be
designated?
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3. Recommendation
3.1. Goals
After extensive discussion in both GEOPRIV and SIP contexts, there
seems to be consensus that a solution for this problem must enable
location-based routing to work even when the <retransmission-allowed>
flag is set to "no". A solution should also give the Rule Maker the
ability to allow or forbid the use of LI for location-based routing
and the ability to allow or forbid the use of LI for the consumption
of the endpoint.
3.2. Core Semantics
Consensus has emerged that any SIP entity which receives a SIP
message containing LI through the operation of SIP's normal routing
procedures or as a result of location-based routing should be
considered an authorized recipient of that LI. Because of this
presumption, one SIP element may pass the LI to another even if the
LO it contains has <retransmission-allowed> set to "no"; this sees
the passing of the SIP message as part of the delivery to authorized
recipients, rather than as retransmission. SIP entities are still
enjoined from passing these messages outside the normal routing to
external entities if <retransmission-allowed> is set to "no", as it
is the passing to 3rd parties that <retransmission-allowed> is meant
to control.
This is considerably different from the presumptions of RFC3963, in
that authorized recipients pass the LO on to other authorized
recipients, but it seems to be the most sensible mechanism given
SIP's operation.
To maintain the Rule Maker's ability to affect the consumption of
this information, two different mechanisms may be used to limit the
distribution of LI and one may used to limit the sphere in which it
may be used; these are discussed below.
3.3. Limiting Access
3.3.1. Limiting access using public-key encryption
One way of limiting access to LI is to encrypt the PIDF-LO object in
a SIP request. If the originator knows which specific entity on the
path needs to inspect the LI, and knows a public key for that entity,
this is a straightforward matter. It is even possible to encrypt
multiple instance of PIDF-LO, containing different policies or levels
of location granularity, in the same SIP request if multiple entities
along the path need to inspect the location.
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This is most likely to be effective in cases where the originator
does not wish the LI to be inspected by intermediate entities and has
the public key for the target of the SIP message, as it is very
difficult for the originator to anticipate the intermediaries through
which a SIP message will pass. It may also be useful in limited
environments where the originator has a trust relationship with a
specific SIP element (e.g. a "home" or first-hop proxy) and it wants
to reveal that LI only to that element.
Note that even in the case where the originator intends to encrypt LI
for the benefit only of the target of the message it may be quite
difficult to anticipate the eventual endpoint of the message. These
encrypted LIs will not be useful in any case where the anticipation
of the originators is not met.
An additional problem posed by this approach is that it requires some
sort of public key discovery system, which compounds the operational
complexity significantly. While this method is included for
completeness, it is the consensus of the working group that the
deployment scenarios in which this is appropriate will be relatively
few; we do not believe it is an appropriate baseline approach.
3.3.2. Limiting access using Location-by-Reference
Another, more feasible approach is leveraging location by reference.
When a SIP request conveys a reference, it cannot be properly said to
be conveying location; location is conveyed upon dereferencing the
URI in the question, and the meaning of <retransmission-allowed> must
be understood in the context of that conveyance, not the forwarding
of the SIP request.
The properties of references, especially the security properties,
vary significantly depending on the nature and disposition of the
resource indicated. Clearly, if the referenced PIDF-LO is available,
in the same form, to any entity along the SIP signaling path that
requests it, then inserting a reference has no advantages over
inserting LI by value (and introduces wasteful complexity). However,
if the Rule Maker influences the results of the dereferencing
process, including determining who can receive LI at what degree of
granularity and what policies are bound with the LI, the security
properties are different.
It might superficially appear that this suffers from the same
problems as the encryption approach, since the Rule Maker must
anticipate a set of entities who are authorized to receive location
information. The difference is that this set does not need to be
communicated in the SIP request in order for authorization decisions
to be made. There is a world of difference between managing a
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whitelist of a thousand parties that might ask for LI and sending a
SIP request containing a thousand differently-encrypted adumbrations
on LI - the former is commonplace and the latter is impossible.
Additionally, some Rule Maker policies might not even require the
establishment of an exhaustive whitelist. For example, it may be
that there exists a finite set of commercial requestors that the Rule
Maker would like to block, in a manner similar to the way ad-blockers
operate in modern web browsers.
In any system where one makes an authorization decision, a certain
cost in authentication must be paid - the greater the assurance the
greater the cost. The precise cost will of course depend on the URI
scheme of the reference. For SIP, Digest has a low computational
cost but requires pre-established keys, which limits applicability.
RFC4474 Identity does not require any pre-association, but it does
make signaling more heavyweight and requires the deployment of
additional features in the network, including a web-like PKI.
But even if no authentication takes place, in the LbyR case the
meaning of <retransmission-allowed> is unambiguous - each entity to
which LI is conveyed in the dereference process is bound by the
retransmission policy. The cost of the reference itself is of course
the server that maintains the resource. While not every SIP client
has access to an appropriate server for this purpose, the fact that
PIDF-LO builds on the typical SIP presence service makes this less
implausible than it might be. Moreover, the LbyR approach casts the
conveyance architecture in a manner familiar from RFC3693, with a
Location Server receiving requests from Location Recipients which may
be accepted or denied. This allows the preservation of the original
semantics of <retransmission-allowed>.
3.3.3. Refraining from including location
The most fundamental mechanism for limiting access to location
information is simply not including it. While location-based-routing
might conceivably occur in almost any SIP message in the future,
there is no requirement that location be included in the general case
to support it. If it is not included and is required, an appropriate
error indicating the lack may be returned and the choice made to
continue communication with the information included. This challenge
and response will slow the establishment of communication when it is
required, but it is the most basic way to ensure that location
distribution is limited to the times when it is required for
communication to proceed.
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3.4. Choosing among the available mechanisms
Refraining from including location is the most appropriate choice for
systems that do not wish to reveal location to any party in the SIP
path.
Location-by-Reference is generally recommended as the most deployable
mechanism for limiting access to LI which is passed via a SIP
message. It is significantly easier to deploy than public key
discovery systems, allows for both whitelists and blacklists, and can
scale in ways that the inclusion of multiple encrypted bodies cannot.
Encryption may be used in a limited set of circumstance where
location-by-value must be used.
3.5. Indicating permission to use location-based routing in SIP
The discussion in 3.3 describes 3 mechanisms for limiting the
distribution of LI to specific entities. There remains the problem
of limiting the use to which LI included by value or by reference may
be put. In order to meet the need to limit that use, this document
recommends the creation of a "Location-Routing-Allowed" header for
SIP.
When "Location-Routing-Allowed" is set to "Yes", the Rule Maker is
indicating permission to use the included LI for location-based
routing. When "Location-Routing-Allowed" is set to "No", the
originator is indicating that this use is not permitted. "Location-
Routing-Allowed" being set to "No" has no protocol-level mechanism
for enforcement of this behavior; like the PIDF-LO "retransmission-
allowed" being set to "no", it is a way for the Rule Maker to express
a preference to the SIP elements which are LI recipients. It may,
however, present a significant optimization. Where a location-by-
reference is included with "Location-Routing-Allowed" set to "No",
the SIP elements along the path know that they do not need to attempt
to dereference the location information; this is significantly faster
than attempting the dereference and being denied at the
authentication stage.
We recommend that "Location-Routing-Allowed" be made mandatory-to-
implement for elements complying with [1].
We recommend that it appear in any SIP message that contains a
location, whether by reference or by value.
We recommend that any SIP message containing a location but no
"Location-Routing-Allowed" header should be treated as containing a
"Location-Routing-Allowed" header set to "No".
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We recommend that a UA be allowed to insert a "Location-Routing-
Allowed" header even when it has not included a location, in order to
set the policy for any locations inserted by other SIP elements.
This allows the UA to assert that it is a Rule Maker for locations,
even when the network architecture in which the UA is present inserts
the location into SIP messages after the UA has originated the SIP
exchange.
We recommend that any SIP element inserting a location, whether by
reference or by value, insert a "Location-Routing-Allowed header if
one is not already present. If one is present, it should not be
over-ridden by the SIP element inserting the location.
We recommend that any SIP element not the originator of a message and
not inserting a location be enjoined from inserting a "Location-
Routing-Allowed" header.
3.6. Behavior of Back-to-Back User Agents
Back-to-Back user agents are always a bit tricky, since they function
in multiple realms. One standard way of approaching their behavior
is to see them as terminating one flow of information and originating
a new one. From that perspective, the correct behavior of a B2BUA
receiving LI on one "back" is to treat that as terminating the
information flow. It can originate a new information flow containing
that LI by value in the other direction only if the PIDF-LO it
contains permits it by using <retransmission-allowed> set to yes. If
the PIDF-LO it contains is encrypted, it can pass it onward with the
understanding that a recipient capable of decrypting it is
authorized.
Note that this case is also easier to handle using the location-by-
reference model. Since the passing of location-by-reference does not
properly include the location itself, it can pass a location-by-
reference pointer in the new direction with the understanding that
the dereferencing protocol handles the determination of whether those
dereferencing the location are authorized recipients or not.
If both sides of a B2BUA's are SIP, we recommend that it copy any
"Location-Routing-Allowed" header value found in the input flow when
it re-originates the flow.
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4. IANA Considerations
This document contains no considerations for the IANA.
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5. Security Considerations
The privacy and security implications of distributing location
information are the fundamental subject of this document.
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6. Acknowledgements
James Polk provided a series of questions regarding the specifics of
the Location-Routing-Allowed mechanism, and this resulted in the
recommendations in Section 3.4
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7. Informative References
[1] Polk, J. and B. Rosen, "Location Conveyance for the Session
Initiation Protocol", draft-ietf-sip-location-conveyance-10
(work in progress), February 2008.
[2] Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., Camarillo, G., Johnston, A.,
Peterson, J., Sparks, R., Handley, M., and E. Schooler, "SIP:
Session Initiation Protocol", RFC 3261, June 2002.
[3] Cuellar, J., Morris, J., Mulligan, D., Peterson, J., and J.
Polk, "Geopriv Requirements", RFC 3693, February 2004.
[4] Peterson, J., "A Presence-based GEOPRIV Location Object Format",
RFC 4119, December 2005.
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Authors' Addresses
Ted Hardie
Qualcomm, Inc.
Email: hardie@qualcomm.com
Jon Peterson
NeuStar, Inc.
1800 Sutter St., Suite 570
Concord, CA 94520
US
Phone: +1 925 363-8720
Email: jon.peterson@neustar.biz
John B. Morris, Jr.
Center for Democracy and Technology
1634 I Street NW
Suite 1100
Washington, DC 20006
US
Email: jmorris@cdt.org
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