IETF 103, Day 2: IPv6, NTP, Routing Security & IoT Thumbnail
IETF 5 November 2018

IETF 103, Day 2: IPv6, NTP, Routing Security & IoT

By Kevin MeynellFormer Senior Manager, Technical and Operational Engagement

This week is 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. And following on from the previous day, Tuesday also features a packed agenda.

LPWAN will be discussing whether to move to a Working Group Last Call on the Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) framework for IPv6 and UDP, that provides both header compression and fragmentation functionalities. Three other drafts describe similar schemes for SigFox,LoRaWAN and IEEE 802.15.4 type networks.


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


Then at 11.20 UTC+7, IPWAVE will be focusing on updates to the specification for transmitting IPv6 Packets over IEEE 802.11 Networks in Vehicular communications, and the use cases for IP-based vehicular networks. There have also been a couple of updates to DNS Name Autoconfiguration for Internet of Things Devices and IPv6 Neighbor Discovery for Prefix and Service Discovery in Vehicular Networks, so these may also be discussed.

6MAN will be meeting at 13.50 UTC+7 and has nine drafts up for discussion. The couple of working group sponsored drafts relate to specifying a IPv6 Segment Routing Header (SRH) and how this can be used by Segment Routing capable nodes, and specifying a Router Advertisement flag to indicate to hosts that a link is IPv6-only. There are also a couple of new drafts that specify how IOAM (In-situ Operations, Administration and Maintenance) records are encapsulated in IPv6, and defining the building blocks that can be used for OAM in Segment Routing with IPv6.

The other drafts being discussed cover communicating NAT64 prefixes to clients with Router Advertisements, Updates to Requirements for IPv6 Options, Path MTU Discovery solutions, a new Path MTU Hop-by-Hop Option to record minimum Path MTU from source to destination, and IPv6 Packet Truncation procedures.

Running in parallel is SIDROPS that is discussing five drafts. RPKI Validation State Unverified proposes to introduced a new ‘Unverified’ validation state for route prefixes, whilst BGPsec Validation State Unverified proposes a similar validation states for BGPsec routes. Two other drafts introduce and define a digitally signed object into an RPKI  that provides a means of verifying that a Customer Autonomous System holder has authorised a Provider Autonomous System to be its upstream provider. That leaves a draft considering policy for dropping invalid routes – including hijacked and missing or erroneously created ROAs for route prefixes.

To conclude the day, there’s a choice of two sessions at 16.10 UTC+7.

NTP is a working group we’ve decided to cover as (amongst other things), it’s working to improve the security of the Network Time Protocol. There’s no less than 20 drafts on the agenda, although Network Time Security for the NTP specifies a mechanism for using TLS and Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) to provide cryptographic security for the client-server mode of NTP. Following on from this will be a review of the NTS implementations and interoperability testing.

T2TRG researches the issues of turning the IoT into reality, and will continue to discuss the State-of-the-Art and Challenges for the Internet of Things Security, the guidance for designing IoT systems using the REST architectural style, and a new data and interaction model called CoRAL (The Constrained RESTful Application Language).

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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