IETF 103, Day 1: IPv6, TLS, DNS Privacy & Other Crypto Thumbnail
IETF 4 November 2018

IETF 103, Day 1: IPv6, TLS, DNS Privacy & Other Crypto

By Kevin MeynellFormer Senior Manager, Technical and Operational Engagement

The Working Group sessions start tomorrow at IETF 103 in Bangkok, Thailand, and we’re bringing you daily blog posts highlighting the topics of interest to us in the ISOC Internet Technology Team. Only four days have been scheduled for the working groups this time around, which means there’s a lot of pack into each day; with Monday being no exception.

V6OPS is a key group and will be meeting on Monday morning starting at 09.00 UTC+7. It’s published four RFCs since its last meeting, including Happy Eyeballs v2, and this time will kick-off with a presentation on the CERNET2 network which is an IPv6-only research and education in China.

There’s also four drafts to be discussed, including three new ones. IPv6-Ready DNS/DNSSSEC Infrastructure recommends how DNS64 should be deployed as it modifies DNS records which in some circumstances can break DNSSEC. IPv6 Address Assignment to End-Sites obsoletes RFC 6177 with best current operational practice from RIPE-690 that makes recommendations on IPv6 prefix assignments, and reiterates that assignment policy and guidelines belong to the RIR community. Pros and Cons of IPv6 Transition Technologies for IPv4aaS discusses different use case scenarios for the five most prominent IPv4-as-a-service (IPv4aaS) transitional technologies, whilst NAT64/464XLAT Deployment Guidelines in Operator and Enterprise Networks is an updated draft that describes considerations with respect to applications or devices using literal IPv4 addresses or non-IPv6 compliant APIs, as well as IPv4-only hosts on an IPv6-only network.


NOTE: If you are unable to attend IETF 103 in person, there are multiple ways to participate remotely.


Running in parallel on Monday morning is ROLL which focuses on IPv6 routing issues for low-power and lossy networks. This will be discussing an update ton the ROLL-BIER design that extends RPL to support routing based on Bit Index Explicit Replication (BIER) in environments with limited and lossy updates. There are also seven other drafts up for discussion, all related to RPL enhancements.

CFRG will be held during the late morning at 11.20 UTC+7. The group has yet to publish the agenda, but there’s a number of currently active drafts covering issues that include Public Key ExchangeThe Transition from Classical to Post-Quantum Cryptography, Randomness Improvements for Security ProtocolsRe-keying Mechanisms for Symmetric Keys, and Hash-Based Signatures.

There’s a choice of two sessions after lunch, starting at 13.50 UTC+7.

TLS holds the first of its two sessions (the second is on Wednesday afternoon) and has a number of important drafts up for discussion including the proposed DTLS 1.3 specification, and Connection Identifiers for DTLS, to avoid the need for additional handshaking upon NAT rebinding. There is also a proposal to deprecate TLS 1.0 and 1.1 as these versions lack support for current and recommended cipher suites.

Other drafts cover TLS Authentication using ETSI TS 103 097 and IEEE 1609.2 certificates, a TLS 1.3 extension that allows a server to authenticate with a certificate while also providing a pre-shared key (PSK) as an input, and definition of universal PSKs for TLS that use an extra key derivation step to reuse the same secret for all TLS 1.3 KDF hashes. In addition, a revised working group charter has been proposed.

DNSOP meets at the same time, and there’s a couple of interesting drafts worth mentioning. One outlines how run a root server instance on the same server as a recursive resolver in order to decrease access time, and another specifies a way of resolvers telling clients what its associated DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) servers are.

6LO concludes the day at 16.10 UTC+7. This will be discussing drafts to update RFC 6775 to support registration extensions for simplifying these operations in 6LoWPAN routers, to update Address Protected Neighbor Discovery for Low-power and Lossy Networks, to update RFC 4944 with a simple protocol to recover packet fragments over a mesh network, as well preparing the IPv6 Backbone Router draft for a Working Group Last Call. The session will be rounded-off with a performance report on fragment forwarding and recovery.

For more background, please read the Rough Guide to IETF 103 from Olaf, DanSteve, and myself.

Relevant Working Groups

Disclaimer: Viewpoints expressed in this post are those of the author and may or may not reflect official Internet Society positions.

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