This week is IETF 102 in Montreal, Canada, and we’re bringing you daily blog posts highlighting the topics of interest to us in the ISOC Internet Technology Team. And today’s topics include IPv6, IoT and Trust technologies.
6MAN commences at 09.30 EDT/UTC-4, and has six new drafts up for discussion covering IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Extensions for Prefix Delegation, IPv6 VPNs, ICMPv6, OAM in Segment Routing Networks with an IPv6 Data plane, allowing low or zero valid lifetimes to be accepted in Router Advertisement Prefix Information Options where it’s known that there can only be one router on the link; as well as introducing a new IPv6 ‘unrecognised’ option for ICMPv6 that conveys whether an underlying network can transmit IPv6 packets.
There are also three working group sponsored drafts, adopted from the last meeting. Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6 describes an extension that causes nodes to generate global scope addresses from interface identifiers that change over time; IPv6 Segment Routing Header specifies how a node can steer a packet through a controlled set of instructions (segments) by prepending an SR header to the packet; whilst IPv6 Router Advertisement IPv6-Only Flag is an update to RFC 5175 that indicates to hosts that a link is IPv6-only.
NOTE: If you are unable to attend IETF 102 in person, there are multiple ways to participate remotely.
There’s a choice of two meetings starting first thing at 09.30 EDT/UTC-4:
DMM is working on solutions for IP networks so that traffic between mobile devices and and correspondent nodes can take an optimal route. And there are several IPv6-related drafts including a couple related to Segment Routing (SRv6) for the Mobile User Plane, as well as on Proxy Mobile IPv6 extensions for Distributed Mobility Management. There’s also three drafts on 5G implementations which might be interesting.
Over in ROLL, they’ll be discussing an applicability statement for battery-powered remote metering devices and two others relating to routing headers and multicast parameters. There’s also a new draft on route discovery for symmetric and asymmetric Point-to-Point traffic flows.
Straight after lunch at 13.30-15.30 EDT/UTC-4 is 6LO , that’s preparing the IPv6 Backbone Router draft for a Working Group Last Call. There will also be an update regarding IESG review of the proposed revisions of RFCs 6550 and 6775 where 6LoWPAN Neighbor Discovery nodes in an RPL domain do not participate in the routing protocol, and a review of security considerations for Address Protected Neighbor Discovery that protects the owner of an address against address theft and impersonation inside a low-power and lossy network. Other drafts up for discussion include Design Considerations for Low-Power Networks to provide guidelines for improving interoperability, IPv6 over Power-Line Communication Networks, and on enabling IPv6 mesh networks over Bluetooth.
During the evening session commencing at 17.20 EDT/UCT-4, there’s another choice to be made between ACME and CFRG.
ACME is primarily focusing on agreeing the Automatic Certificate Management Environment protocol that is used to automate the process of verification, certificate issuance and revocation, and will be looking for consensus on a Working Group Last Call. Also up for discussion though, is the ACME TLS ALPN extension that allows for domain control validation using TLS, and Support for Short-Term, Automatically-Renewed (STAR) Certificates.
CFRG has five drafts on the agenda including randomness improvements for security protocols which is critical to the robustness of TLS and other security related cryptography; and Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs) which offer provide privacy against offline enumeration on data stored in a hash-based
data structure. Somewhat related is a draft that specifies a number of algorithms that may be used to hash arbitrary strings to Elliptic Curves, and another specifying a hash function with arbitrary output length.
Finally, although it’s not normally one of the Rough Guide topics, we’d like to highlight that the Global Access to the Internet for All (GAIA) Research Group will be holding a meeting at 15.50 EDT/UTC-4. This is chaired by our colleague Jane Coffin and aims to raise awareness and discuss the challenges and opportunities of enabling global Internet access. In particular to document and share deployment experiences and research results with the wider community, and to analyse how the costs of providing Internet access can be reduced for areas with low penetration.
For more background, please read the Rough Guide to IETF 102 from Olaf, Dan, Andrei, Steve, Karen and myself.
Relevant Working Groups
- Distributed Mobility Management (dmm) – Van Horne @ 09.30-12.00 UTC-4
- Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks (roll) – Duluth @ 09.30-12.00 UTC-4
- IPv6 over Networks of Resource-constrained Nodes (6lo) – Duluth @ 13.30-15.30 UTC-4
- Global Access to the Internet for All (Gaia) – Viger @ 15.50 – 17.20 UTC-4
- Crypto Forum (cfrg) – Viger @ 17.20 – 18.20 UTC-4
- Automated Certificate Management Environment (acme) – Van Horne @ 17.20-18.20 UTC-4