MAGMA Working Group M. Christensen
Internet Draft jCAPS
January 2002 F. Solensky
Expiration Date: July 2002
IGMP and MLD snooping switches
<draft-ietf-magma-snoop-01.txt>
Status of this Memo
This document is the successor of draft-ietf-magma-snoop-00 which was
presented at the 52'nd IETF in Salt Lake City. The main differences
between this and the previous version is a restructuring of the draft
to introduce the main result as early as possible. Also the draft has
been trimmed to a smaller size. No new results are presented, as the
draft is expected to published as Informational within the next four
months.
This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026 [RFC2026].
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other
groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts.
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."
The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt
The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
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Abstract
This memo describes the requirements for IGMP and MLD snooping
switches. The requirements for IGMPv2 snooping switches are based on
best current practices. IGMPv3 and MLDv2 snooping are also covered in
this draft although we are not aware of any such implementations at
the time of writing.
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The memo also describes the interoperability problems and issues that
can arise when a mixed deployment of IGMPv3 and IGMPv2 capable hosts
and routers are interconnected by a switch with IGMP snooping
capabilities.
Areas which are of relevance to IGMP and MLD snooping switches, such
as link layer topology changes and Ethernet specific encapsulation
issues are also considered.
It is intended as an accompanying document to the IGMPv3 and MLDv2
specifications.
1. Introduction
In recent years, a number of commercial vendors have introduced prod-
ucts described as "IGMP snooping switches" to the market. These
devices do not adhere to the conceptual model that provides the
strict separation of functionality between different communications
layers in the ISO model and instead utilizes information in the upper
level protocol headers as factors to be considered in the processing
at the lower levels.
This is analogous to the manner in which a router can act as a fire-
wall by looking into the transport protocol's header before allowing
a packet to be forwarded to its destination address.
In the case of multicast traffic, an IGMP snooping switch provides
the benefit of conserving bandwidth on those segments of the network
where no node has expressed interest in receiving packets addressed
to the group address. This is in contrast to normal switch behaviour
where multicast traffic is typically forwarded on all interfaces.
Many switch datasheets state support for IGMP snooping, but no
requirements for this exist today. It is the authors hope that the
information presented in this draft will supply this information.
The requirements presented here is based on the following information
sources: The IGMP specifications [RFC112][RFC2236][IGMPv3], vendor
supplied technical documents [CISCO], bug reports [MSOFT], discus-
sions with people invovled in design of IGMP snooping switches, MAGMA
mailinglist discussions, and on replies by switch vendors to an
implementation questionnaire.
The discussions in this document are based on IGMP which applies to
IPv4 only. For IPv6 we must use MLD instead. Because MLD is based on
IGMP we do not repeat the whole discussion and requirements for MLD
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snooping switches. Instead we point out the few cases where there is
a difference compared to IGMP.
2. IGMP Snooping Requirements
The following sections list the requirements for an IGMP snooping
switch. The requirement is stated and is supplemented by a discus-
sion. All implementation discussions are examples only and there may
well be other ways to achieve the same functionality.
2.1. Forwarding rules
The IGMP snooping functionality is here separated in a control section
(IGMP forwarding) and data section (Data forwarding).
2.1.1. IGMP Forwarding Rules
1) A snooping switch MUST only forward IGMP Membership Reports on ports
where multicast routers are attached. Alternatively stated: A snooping
switch MUST NOT forward IGMP Membership Reports to ports on which only
hosts are attached.
This is the main IGMP snooping functionality. Sending membership reports
to other hosts can result (For IGMPv2 and IGMPv1) in the unwanted pre-
vention of a host wishing to join a specific multicast group. This is
not a problem in a IGMPv3 only network because there is no cancellation
of IGMP Membership reports.
The switch supporting IGMP snooping MUST maintain a list of multicast
routers and the ports on which they are attached. This list SHOULD be
built using IGMP Multicast Router Discovery [MRDISC]. IGMP snooping
switches MAY alternatively build this list based on
a) The arrival port for IGMP Queries (sent by multicast routers) or
b) List of ports configured (by management) as having multicast routers
attached.
Implementation example: IGMP snooping can be achieved by redirecting all
IGMP packets (IP packets with IP-PROTO = 2) to the CPU (or similar
higher layer entity) for IGMP message processing and table management.
2) IGMP snooping switches MAY implement "proxy-reporting" in which
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reports received from downstream hosts are summarized and used to build
internal membership states. An IGMP proxy-reporting switch would then
report it's own state in response to upstream queriers. If the switch
does not have an IP address it SHOULD use the address 0.0.0.0 as source
in these reports.
An IGMP proxy-reporting switch may act as Querier for the downstream
hosts while proxy reporting to the 'real' upstream queriers.
It should be noted that there may be multiple IGMP proxy-reporting
switches in the network all using the 0.0.0.0 source IP address. In this
case the switches can be identified by their, link layer source MAC
address.
IGMP membership reports should not be rejected because of a source IP
address of 0.0.0.0.
3) The switch that supports IGMP snooping MUST forward all unrecognized
IGMP messages and MUST NOT attempt to make use of any information beyond
the end of the network layer header. In particular, messages where any
reserved fields are non-zero MUST NOT be subject to "normal" snooping
since this could indicate an incompatible change to the message format.
4) An IGMP snooping switch SHOULD be aware of link layer topology
changes. Following a topology change the switch SHOULD initiate the
transmission of a General Query on all ports in order to reduce network
convergence time.
5) An IGMP snooping switch MUST discard from the IGMP snooping process
IGMP packets where IP or IGMP headers have checksum errors.
2.1.2. Data Forwarding Rules
6) Packets with a destination IP (DIP) address in the 224.0.0.X range
which are *not* IGMP MUST be forwarded on all ports.
This requirement is based on fact that many hosts exist today, which
does not Join IP multicast addresses in this range before sending or
listening to IP multicast. Furthermore since the 224.0.0.X address range
is defined as link local (not to be routed) it seems unnecessary to keep
state for each address in this range.
7) Packets with a destination IP address outside 224.0.0.X which are
*not* IGMP SHOULD be forwarded according to group based port membership
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tables and MUST also be forwarded on router ports.
This is the core IGMP snooping requirement for the data path.
Discussion: An implementation could maintain separate membership and
multicast router tables in software and then "merge" these tables into a
current forwarding cache.
8) If a switch receives a *non* IGMP multicast packet without having
first processed Membership Reports for the group address, it MUST for-
ward the packet on all ports. In other words, the switch must allow for
the possibility that connected hosts and routers have been upgraded to
support future versions or extensions of IGMP that the switch does not
yet recognize. A switch MAY have a configuration option that suppresses
this operation, but default behavior MUST be to allow flooding of unreg-
istered packets.
9) IGMP snooping switches MAY maintain forwarding tables based on either
MAC addresses or IP addresses. If a switch supports both types of for-
warding tables then the default behavior MUST be to use IP addresses.
Discussion: Forwarding based on MAC addresses is subject to the problem
associated with the 32-fold IP address to 1 MAC address mapping.
10) Switches which rely on information in the IP header SHOULD verify
that the IP header checksum is correct. If the checksum fails the packet
SHOULD be silently discarded.
2.2. IGMP snooping related problems
A special problem arise in the network consisting of IGMPv3 routers as
well as IGMPv2 and IGMPv3 hosts interconnected by a IGMPv2 snooping
switch. IGMPv3 has a mechanism to fall back to IGMPv2 when receiving
IGMPv2 membership reports. This means that the network will converged on
IGMPv2 eventually. However, the convergence time will lead to supression
of v3 Hosts for several minutes.
Therefore it is recommended that in such a network, the multicast router
is configured to use IGMPv2.
3. IPv6 Considerations
In order to avoid confusion, the previous discussions have been based
on IGMPv3 functionality which only applies to IPv4 multicast. In the
case of IPv6 most of the above discussions are still valid with a few
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exceptions which we will describe here.
In IPv6 the protocol for multicast group maintenance is called Multi-
cast Listener Discovery (MLDv2). IPv6 is not widely deployed today
and neither is IPv6 multicast. However, it is anticipated that at
some time IPv6 switches capable of MLD snooping will appear.
The three main differences between IGMPv3 and MLDv2 are
- MLDv2 uses ICMPv6 message types instead of IGMP message types.
- The ethernet encapsulation is a mapping of 32bits of the 128bit
DIP addresses into 48bit DMAC addresses [IPENCAPS].
- Multicast router discovery is done using Neighbor Discovery Pro-
tocol (NDP) for IPv6. NDP uses ICMPv6 message types.
A minor difference which applies to the requirements section is that in
IPv6 there is no checksum in the IP header. This is the reason that the
checksum validation requirement is listed as a MAY.
The fact that MLDv2 is using ICMPv6 adds new requirements to a snooping
switch because ICMPv6 has multiple uses aside from MLD. This means that
it is no longer sufficient to detect that the next-header field of the
IP header is ICMPv6 in order to redirect packets to the CPU. If this
was the case the CPU queue assigned for MLD would potentially be filled
with non-MLD related packets. Furthermore ICMPv6 packets destined for
other hosts would not reach their destination. A solution is either to
require that the snooping switch looks further into the packets or to be
able to detect a multicast DMAC address in conjunction with ICMPv6. The
first solution is desirable only if it is configurable which message
types should trigger a CPU redirect and which should not. The reason is
that a hardcoding of message types is unflexible for the introduction of
new message types. The second solution introduces the risk of new pro-
tocols, which are not related to MLD but uses ICMPv6 and multicast DMAC
addresses wrongly being identified as MLD. It is suggested that solution
one is the preferred if the switch is capable of triggering CPU redi-
rects on individual ICMPv6 message types. If this is not the case then
use solution two.
The mapping from IP multicast addresses to multicast DMAC addresses
introduces a potentially enormous overlap. The structure of an IPv6 mul-
ticast address is shown in figure 5. Theoretically 2**80, two to the
power of 80 (128 - 8 - 4 - 4 - 32) unique DIP addresses could map to one
DMAC address. This should be compared to 2**5 in the case of IPv4.
Initial allocation of IPv6 multicast addresses, however, uses only the
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lower 32 bits of group ID. This eliminates the address ambiguity for the
time being but it should be noted that the allocation policy may change
in the future.
| 8 | 4 | 4 | 112 bits |
+--------+----+----+---------------------------------------+
|11111111|flgs|scop| group ID |
+--------+----+----+---------------------------------------+
Figure 5
In the case of IPv6 forwarding can be made on the basis of DMAC
addresses in the forseable future.
Finally, we mention the reserved address range FF0X:0:0:0:0:0:X:X where
X is any value. This range is similar to 224.0.0.X for IPv4 and is
reserved to routing protocols and resource discovery [RFC2375]. In the
case of IPv6 it is suggested that packets in this range are forwarded on
all ports if they are not MLD packets.
4. Security Considerations
Security considerations for IGMPv3 are accounted for in [IGMPv3].
The introduction of IGMP snooping switches adds the following consid-
erations with regard to IP multicast.
The exclude source failure which could cause traffic from sources
that are 'black listed' to reach hosts that have requested otherwise.
This can also occur in certain network topologies without IGMP snoop-
ing.
It is possible to generate packets which make the switch wrongly
believe that there is a multicast router on the segment on which the
source is attached. This will potentially lead to excessive flooding
on that segment. The authentication methods discussed in [IGMPv3]
will also provide protection in this case.
IGMP snooping switches which rely on the IP header of a packet for
their operation and which do not validate the header checksum poten-
tially will forward packets on the wrong ports. Even though the IP
headers are protected by the ethernet checksum this is a potential
vulnerability.
Generally though, it is worth to stress that IP multicast must so far
be considered insecure until the work of for example the suggested
Multicast Security (MSEC) working group or similar is completed or at
least has matured.
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5. IGMP Questionnaire
As part of this work the following questions were asked both on the
MAGMA discussion list and sent to known switch vendors implementing IGMP
snooping. The individual contributions have been anonymized upon
request.
The questions were:
Q1 Does your switches perform IGMP Join aggregation? In other words,
are IGMP joins intercepted, absorbed by the hardware/software so that
only one Join is forwarded to the querier?
Q2 Is multicast forwarding based on MAC addresses? Would datagrams
addressed to multicast IP addresses 224.1.2.3 and 239.129.2.3 be for-
warded on the same ports-groups?
Q3 Is it possible to forward multicast datagrams based on IP addresses
(not routed). In other words, could 224.1.2.3 and 239.129.2.3 be for-
warded on different port-groups with unaltered TTL?
Q4 Are multicast datagrams within the range 224.0.0.1 to 224.0.0.255
forwarded on all ports whether or not IGMP Joins have been sent?
Q5 Are multicast frames within the MAC address range 01:00:5E:00:00:01
to 01:00:5E:00:00:FF forwarded on all ports whether or not IGMP joins
have been sent?
Q6 Does your switch support forwarding to ports on which IP multicast
routers are attached in addition to the ports where IGMP Joins have been
received?
Q7 Is your IGMP snooping functionality fully implemented in hardware?
Q8 Is your IGMP snooping functionality partly software implemented?
Q9 Can topology changes (for example spanning tree configuration
changes) be detected by the IGMP snooping functionality so that for
example new queries can be sent or tables can be updated to ensure
robustness?
The answers were:
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---------------------------------------------
Switch Vendor
-------------------------+---+---+---+---+---
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
-------------------------+---+---+---+---+---
Q1 Join aggregation | x | x | x | |
Q2 Layer-2 forwarding | x | x | x | x |
Q3 Layer-3 forwarding |(1)| |(1)| |
Q4 224.0.0.X aware |(1)| x |(1)|(2)|
Q5 1:00:5e:0:0:X aware | x | x | x |(2)|
Q6 Mcast router list | x | x | x | x |
Q7 Hardware implemented | | | | |
Q8 Software assisted | x | x | x | x |
Q9 Topology change aware | x | x | x | x |
-------------------------+---+---+---+---+---
x Means that the answer was Yes.
(1) In some products (typically high-end) Yes, in others No.
(2) Currently no, but will be real soon.
6. IPR Issues
It appears that a number of patents have been filed which may apply to
this draft or parts thereof. None of these patents, listed below, have
been filed by the authors of this draft or companies in which they are
or have been employed.
We, the authors, have not tried to evaluate whether these patents are
violated by implementing IGMP snooping according to this document. The
IETF/IESG have been notified about the patents.
International patent: WO 96/34474, Oct. 31 1996, Title: "Broadcast
transmission in a data network"
US patent: Number 5,608,726, Mar. 4, 1997 (filed 1995) Title: "Network-
ing Bridge with Multicast forwarding table"
US patent: Number 5,898,686, Apr. 27, 1999 (filed 1996) Title: "Network-
ing Bridge with Multicast forwarding table"
Australian patent: Application No. 65440/98 Title: "System, Device, and
Method for Managing Multicast Group Memberships in a Multicast Network"
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7. References
[BRIDGE] IEEE 802.1D, "Media Access Control (MAC) Bridges"
[CISCO] Cisco Tech Notes, "Multicast In a Campus Network: CGMP
and IGMP snooping", http://www.cisco.com/warp/pub-
lic/473/22.html
[IANA] Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, "Internet Multicast
Addresses", http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assign-
ments/multicast-addresses
[IGMPv3] Cain, B., "Internet Group Management Protocol, Version
3", draft-ietf-idmr-igmp-v3-06.txt, November 2000
[IPENCAPS] Crawford, M., "Transmission of IPv6 Packets over Ether-
net Networks", RFC2464, December 1998.
[MLDv2] Vida, R., "Multicast Listener Discovery Version 2
(MLDv2) for IPv6", draft-vida-mld-v2-00.txt, February
2001.
[MRDISC] Biswas, S. "IGMP Multicast Router Discovery", draft-
ietf-idmr-igmp-mrdisc-06.txt, May 2001.
[MSOFT] Microsoft support article Q223136, "Some LAN Switches
with IGMP Snooping Stop Forwarding Multicast Packets on
RRAS Startup", http://support.microsoft.com/sup-
port/kb/articles/Q223/1/36.ASP
[RFC1112] Deering, S., "Host Extensions for IP Multicasting", RFC
1112, August 1989.
[RFC2026] Bradner, S. "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision
3", RFC2026, October 1996.
Christensen, Solensky [Page 10]
RFC DRAFT January 2001
[RFC2236] Fenner, W., "Internet Group Management Protocol, Version
2", RFC2236, November 1997.
[RFC2375] Hinden, R. "IPv6 Multicast Address Assignments",
RFC2375, July 1998.
8. Acknowledgements
We would like to thank (in no identifiable order) Hugh Holbrook, Bill
Fenner, Yiqun Cai, Edward Hilquist, Toerless Eckert, Kevin Humphries,
Karen Kimball and Martin Bak for comments and suggestions on this
document. Furthermore, the following companies are acknowledged for
their contributions: Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation, Cisco Sys-
tems, Hewlett-Packard, Enterasys Networks.
9. Author's Addresses:
Morten Jagd Christensen
jCAPS
Begoniavej 13
2820 Gentofte
DENMARK
email: morten@jcaps.com
Frank Solensky
email: solenskyf@acm.org
Christensen, Solensky [Page 11]
