path: root/doc/rfc/rfc1636.txt

Network Working Group                                          R. Braden
Request for Comments: 1636                                           ISI
Category: Informational                                         D. Clark
                                     MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
                                                              S. Crocker
                                       Trusted Information Systems, Inc.
                                                              C. Huitema
                                                        INRIA, IAB Chair
                                                               June 1994


                       Report of IAB Workshop on

                 Security in the Internet Architecture

                          February 8-10, 1994

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  This memo
   does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of
   this memo is unlimited.

Abstract

   This document is a report on an Internet architecture workshop,
   initiated by the IAB and held at USC Information Sciences Institute
   on February 8-10, 1994.  This workshop generally focused on security
   issues in the Internet architecture.

   This document should be regarded as a set of working notes containing
   ideas about security that were developed by Internet experts in a
   broad spectrum of areas, including routing, mobility, realtime
   service, and provider requirements, as well as security.  It contains
   some significant diversity of opinions on some important issues.
   This memo is offered as one input in the process of developing viable
   security mechanisms and procedures for the Internet.














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Table of Contents

   1. INTRODUCTION ..................................................  2
   2. OVERVIEW ......................................................  4
      2.1  Strategic and Political Issues ...........................  4
      2.2  Security Issues ..........................................  4
      2.3  DNS Names for Certificates ...............................  7
   3. FIREWALL ARCHITECTURE .........................................  9
      3.1  Introduction .............................................  9
      3.2  Application-Layer Firewalls .............................. 11
      3.3  IP-Layer Firewalls ....................................... 12
   4. SECURE QOS FORWARDING ......................................... 21
      4.1  The Requirement for Setup ................................ 21
      4.2  Securing the Setup Process. .............................. 22
      4.3  Validating an LLID ....................................... 24
      4.4  Dynamics of Setup ........................................ 28
      4.5  Receiver-Initiated Setup ................................. 30
      4.6  Other Issues ............................................. 30
   5. AN AUTHENTICATION SERVICE ..................................... 35
      5.1  Names and Credentials .................................... 36
      5.2  Identity-Based Authorization ............................. 37
      5.3  Choosing Credentials ..................................... 38
   6. OTHER ISSUES .................................................. 39
      6.1  Privacy and Authentication of Multicast Groups ........... 39
      6.2  Secure Plug-and-Play a Must .............................. 41
      6.3  A Short-Term Confidentiality Mechanism ................... 42
   7. CONCLUSIONS ................................................... 44
      7.1  Suggested Short-Term Actions ............................. 44
      7.2  Suggested Medium-Term Actions ............................ 46
      7.3  Suggested Long-Term Actions .............................. 46
   APPENDIX A -- Workshop Organization .............................. 48
   Security Considerations .......................................... 52
   Authors' Addresses ............................................... 52

1. INTRODUCTION

   The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) holds occasional workshops
   designed to consider long-term issues and strategies for the
   Internet, and to suggest future directions for the Internet
   architecture.  This long-term planning function of the IAB is
   complementary to the ongoing engineering efforts performed by working
   groups of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), under the
   leadership of the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and area
   directorates.

   An IAB-initiated workshop on the role of security in the Internet
   Architecture was held on February 8-10, 1994 at the Information
   Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, in



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   Marina del Rey, California.  This RFC reports the results of the
   workshop.

   In addition to the IAB members, attendees at this meeting included
   the IESG Area Directors for the relevant areas (Internet, Transport,
   Security, and IPng) and a group of 15 other experts in the following
   areas:  IPng, routing, mobility, realtime service, and security (see
   Appendix for a list of attendees).  The IAB explicitly tried to
   balance the number of attendees from each area of expertise.
   Logistics limited the attendance to about 30, which unfortunately
   meant that many highly qualified experts were omitted from the
   invitation list.

   In summary, the objectives of this workshop were (1) to explore the
   interconnections between security and the rest of the Internet
   architecture, and (2) to develop recommendations for the Internet
   community on future directions with respect to security.  These
   objectives arose from a conviction in the IAB that the two most
   important problem areas for the Internet architecture are scaling and
   security.  While the scaling problems have led to a flood of
   activities on IPng, there has been less effort devoted to security.

   Although some came to the workshop eager to discuss short-term
   security issues in the Internet, the workshop program was designed to
   focus more on long-term issues and broad principles.  Thus, the
   meeting began with the following ground rule: valid topics of
   discussion should involve both security and at least one from the
   list: (a) routing (unicast and multicast), (b) mobility, and (c)
   realtime service.  As a basis for initial discussion, the invitees
   met via email to generate a set of scenarios (see Appendix)
   satisfying this ground rule.

   The 30 attendees were divided into three "breakout" groups, with each
   group including experts in all the areas.  The meeting was then
   structured as plenary meetings alternating with parallel breakout
   group sessions (see the agenda in Appendix).  On the third day, the
   groups produced text summarizing the results of their discussions.
   This memo is composed of that text, somewhat rearranged and edited
   into a single document.

   The meeting process determined the character of this document.  It
   should be regarded as a set of working notes produced by mostly-
   autonomous groups, containing some diversity of opinions as well as
   duplication of ideas.  It is not the output of the "security
   community", but instead represents ideas about security developed by
   a broad spectrum of Internet experts.  It is offered as a step in a
   process of developing viable security mechanisms and procedures for
   the Internet.



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2. OVERVIEW

   2.1  Strategic and Political Issues

      Despite the workshop emphasis on architectural issues, there was
      considerable discussion of the real-politik of security.

      For a number of years, the IETF, with IAB backing, has worked on
      developing PEM, which provides email security with a great deal of
      functionality.  A question was repeatedly raised at the workshop:
      why has user acceptance of PEM been slow?  A number of answers to
      this question were suggested.

      (a)  High-quality implementations have been slow in coming.

      (b)  The use of a patented technology, the RSA algorithm, violates
           social conventions of the Internet.

      (c)  Export restrictions dampen vendor enthusiasm.

      (d)  PEM currently depends upon a certificate hierarchy for its
           names, and certificates form a new and complex name space.
           There is no organizational infrastructure in place for creat-
           ing and managing this name space.

      (e)  There is no directory infrastructure available for looking up
           certificates.

           The decision to use X.500 has been a complete failure, due to
           the slow deployment of X.500 in the Internet.  Because of UDP
           packet size restrictions, it is not currently feasible to
           store certificates in the DNS, even if the DNS were expanded
           to hold records for individual email users.

      It seems probable that more than one, and possibly all, of these
      reasons are at work to discourage PEM adoption.

      The baleful comment about eating: "Everything I enjoy is either
      immoral, illegal, or fattening" seems to apply to the cryptography
      technology that is required for Internet security.

   2.2  Security Issues

      Almost everyone agrees that the Internet needs more and better
      security.  However, that may mean different things to different
      people.  Four top-level requirements for Internet security were
      identified: end-to-end security, end-system security, secure QOS,
      and secure network infrastructure.



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      A.   End-to-End Security

           One requirement is to support confidentiality, authentication
           and integrity for end-to-end communications.  These security
           services are best provided on an end-to-end basis, in order
           to minimize the number of network components that users must
           trust.  Here the "end" may be the end system itself, or a
           proxy (e.g., a firewall) acting on behalf of an end system.

           For point-to-point applications, the workshop felt that
           existing security techniques are well suited to support
           confidentiality, authentication and integrity services
           efficiently.  These existing techniques include symmetric
           encryption applied on an end-to-end basis, message digest
           functions, and key management algorithms.  Current work in
           these areas in the IETF include the PEM and Common
           Authentication Technologies working groups.

           The group favored a strategic direction for coping with
           export restrictions:  separate authentication from privacy
           (i.e., confidentiality).  This will allow work to proceed on
           authentication for the Internet, despite government
           restrictions on export of privacy technology.  Conversely, it
           will allow easy deployment of privacy without authentication,
           where this is appropriate.

           The workshop explored the implications of multicasting for
           end-to-end security.  Some of the unicast security techniques
           can be applied directly to multicast applications, while
           others must be modified.  Section 6.2 contains the results of
           these discussions; in summary, the conclusions were:

           a)   Existing technology is adequate to support
                confidentiality, authentication, and integrity at the
                level of an entire multicast group.  Supporting
                authentication and integrity at the level of an
                individual multicast source is performance-limited and
                will require technology advances.

           b)   End-to-end controls should be based on end system or
                user identifiers, not low level identifiers or locator
                information.  This requirement should spawn engineering
                work which consists of applying known key distribution








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                and cryptographic techniques.

      B.   End-System Security

           Every host has its own security defenses, but the strength of
           these defenses depends upon the care that is taken in
           administering them.  Careful host security administration
           means plugging security holes in the kernel and applications
           as well as enforcing discipline on users to set good (hard to
           crack) passwords.

           Good security administration is labor-intensive, and
           therefore organizations often find it difficult to maintain
           the security of a large number of internal machines.  To
           protect their machines from outside subversion, organizations
           often erect an outer security wall or "perimeter".  Machines
           inside the perimeter communicate with the rest of the
           Internet only through a small set of carefully managed
           machines called "firewalls".  Firewalls may operate at the
           application layer, in which case they are application relays,
           or at the IP layer, in which case they are firewall routers.

           The workshop spent considerable time on the architecture of
           firewall routers.  The results are contained in Section 3.

      C.   Secure QOS

           The Internet is being extended to provide quality-of-service
           capabilities; this is the topic called "realtime service" in
           the workshop.  These extensions raise a new set of security
           issues for the architecture, to assure that users are not
           allowed to attach to resources they are not authorized to
           use, both to prevent theft of resources and to prevent denial
           of service due to unauthorized traffic.  The resources to be
           protected include link shares, service classes or queues,
           multicast trees, and so on.  These resources are used as
           virtual channels within the network, where each virtual
           channel is intended to be used by a particular subset or
           "class" of packets.

           Secure QOS, i.e., protection against improper virtual channel
           usage, is a form of access control mechanism.  In general it
           will be based on some form of state establishment (setup)
           that defines authorized "classes".  This setup may be done
           via management configuration (typically in advance and for
           aggregates of users), or it may be done dynamically via
           control information in packets or special messages (typically
           at the time of use by the source or receiver(s) of the



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           flow/data).  In addition to state establishment, some form of
           authentication will be needed to assure that successive
           packets belong to the established class.  The general case to
           be solved is the multicast group, since in general the
           multicast problem includes the two-party case as a subset.
           The workshop developed an approach to the secure QOS problem,
           which appears in Section 4 below.

      D.   Secure Network Infrastructure

           Network operation depends upon the management and control
           protocols used to configure and operate the network
           infrastructure, including routers and DNS servers.  An attack
           on the network infrastructure may cause denial-of-service
           from the user viewpoint, but from the network operators'
           viewpoint, security from attack requires authentication and
           integrity for network control and management messages.

           Securing the routing protocols seems to be a straightforward
           engineering task.  The workshop concluded the following.

           a)   All routing information exchanges should be
                authenticated between neighboring routers.

           b)   The sources of all route information should be
                authenticated.

           c)   Although authenticating the authority of an injector of
                route information is feasible, authentication of
                operations on that routing information (e.g.,
                aggregation) requires further consideration.

           Securing router management protocols (e.g., SNMP, Telnet,
           TFTP) is urgent, because of the currently active threats.
           Fortunately, the design task should be a straightforward
           application of existing authentication mechanisms.

           Securing DNS is an important issue, but it did not receive
           much attention at the workshop.

   2.3  DNS Names for Certificates

      As noted in Section 2.1, work on PEM has assumed the use of X.509
      distinguished names as the basis for issuing certificates, with
      public-key encryption.  The most controversial discussion at the
      workshop concerned the possibility of using DNS (i.e., domain)
      names instead of X.509 distinguished names as (at least) an
      interim basis for Internet security.



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      The argument in favor of DNS names is that they are simple and
      well understood in the Internet world.  It is easy for a computer
      operating in the Internet to be identified this way, and users who
      receive email on such machines already have DNS mailbox names.  In
      contrast, introducing X.509 distinguished names for security will
      add a new layer of names.  Most importantly, there is an existing
      administrative model for assigning DNS names.  There is no
      administrative infrastructure for assigning X.509 distinguished
      names, and generating them may be too complex for early
      acceptance.  The advocates of DNS names for certificates hope that
      using DNS names would encourage the widespread use of security in
      the Internet.  It is expected that DNS names can be replaced later
      by a more capable naming mechanism such as X.509-based
      certificates.

      The basic argument against DNS names as a basis for security is
      that they are too "weak".  Their use may lead to confusion in many
      instances, and this confusion can only grow as more organizations
      and individuals attach to the Internet.  Some commercial email
      systems employ numeric mailbox names, and in many organizations
      there are uncertainties such as whether "bumber@foo.edu" belongs
      to Bill Umber or Tom Bumber.  While it is feasible to make DNS
      names more descriptive, there is a concern that the existing
      infrastructure, with millions of short, non-descriptive names,
      will be an impediment to adoption of more descriptive names.

      It was noted that the question of what name space to use for
      certificates is independent of the problem of building an
      infrastructure for retrieving those names.  Because of UDP packet
      size restrictions, it would not be feasible to store certificates
      in the DNS without significant changes, even if the DNS were
      expanded to hold records for individual email users.

      The group was unable to reach a consensus on the issue of using
      DNS names for security; further discussion in the Internet
      community is needed.















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3. FIREWALL ARCHITECTURE

   3.1  Introduction

      A firewall may be used to isolate a specific connected segment of
      Internet topology.  When such a segment has multiple links to the
      rest of the Internet, coordinated firewall machines are required
      on all the links.

      Firewalls may be implemented at different layers in the protocol
      stack.  They are most commonly implemented at the application
      layer by forwarding (application) gateways, or at the IP
      (Internet) layer by filtering routers.  Section 3.2 discusses
      application gateways.  Section 3.3 concerns Internet-layer
      firewalls, which filter IP datagrams entering or leaving a
      security perimeter.

      The general architectural model for a firewall should separate
      policy, i.e., determining whether or not the requester of a
      service should be granted access to that service, from control,
      i.e., limiting access to resources to those who have been granted
      access.

      3.1.1  The Use for Firewalls

         Firewalls are a very emotional topic in the Internet community.
         Some community members feel the firewall concept is very
         powerful because firewalls aggregate security functions in a
         single place, simplifying management, installation and
         configuration.  Others feel that firewalls are damaging for the
         same reason: they provide "a hard, crunchy outside with a soft
         chewy center", i.e., firewalls foster a false sense of
         security, leading to lax security within the firewall
         perimeter.  They observe that much of the "computer crime" in
         corporate environments is perpetrated by insiders, immune to
         the perimeter defense strategy.  Firewall advocates counter
         that firewalls are important as an additional safeguard; they
         should not be regarded as a substitute for careful security
         management within the perimeter.  Firewall detractors are also
         concerned about the difficulty of using firewalls, requiring
         multiple logins and other out-of-band mechanisms, and their
         interference with the usability and vitality of the Internet.

         However, firewalls are a fact of life in the Internet today.
         They have been constructed for pragmatic reasons by
         organizations interested in a higher level of security than may
         be possible without them.  This section will try to outline
         some of the advantages and disadvantages of firewalls, and some



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         instances where they are useful.

         Consider a large organization of thousands of hosts.  If every
         host is allowed to communicate directly with the outside world,
         attackers will attempt to penetrate the organization by finding
         the weakest host in the organization, breaching its defenses,
         and then using the resources of that host to extend the
         penetration further within the organization.  In some sense,
         firewalls are not so much a solution to a security problem as
         they are a reaction to a more basic software
         engineering/administration problem: configuring a large number
         of host systems for good security.  If this more basic problem
         could be solved, firewalls would generally be unnecessary.

         It is interesting to consider the effect that implementing a
         firewall has upon various individuals in the organization.
         Consider first the effect upon an organization's most secure
         host.  This host basically receives little or no extra
         protection, because its own perimeter defenses are as strong or
         stronger than the firewall.  In addition, the firewall will
         probably reduce the connectivity available to this host, as
         well as the reliability of the communications path to the
         outside world, resulting in inconvenience to the user(s) of
         this host.  From this (most secure) user's point of view, the
         firewall is a loss.

         On the other hand, a host with poor security can "hide" behind
         the firewall.  In exchange for a more limited ability to
         communicate with the outside world, this host can benefit from
         the higher level of security provided by the firewall, which is
         assumed to be based upon the best security available in the
         entire  organization.  If this host only wants to communicate
         with other hosts inside the organization, the outside
         communications limitations imposed by the firewall may not even
         be noticed.  From this host's viewpoint, better security has
         been gained at little or no cost.

         Finally, consider the point of view of the organization as a
         whole.  A firewall allows the extension of the best security in
         the organization across the whole organization.  This is a
         benefit (except in the case where all host perimeter defenses
         in the organization are equal).  Centralized access control
         also becomes possible, which may be either a benefit or a cost,
         depending upon the organization.  The "secure" hosts within the
         organization may perceive a loss, while the "unsecure" hosts
         receive a benefit.  The cost/benefit ratio to the organization
         as a whole thus depends upon the relative numbers of "secure"
         and "unsecure" hosts in the organization.



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         Consider some cases where firewalls do not make sense.  An
         individual can be thought of as an organization of one host.
         The security of all the host(s) is thus (trivially) identical,
         and by definition the best available to the organization.  In
         this case the choice of firewall is simple.  Does this
         individual wish to communicate with the outside or not?  If
         not, then the "perfect" firewall is implemented (by complete
         disconnection).  If yes, then the host perimeter will be the
         same as the firewall perimeter, so a firewall becomes
         unnecessary.

         Another interesting case is an organization that consists of
         individuals with few shared interests.  This might be the case
         of a service provider that sells public access to the network.
         An unrelated community of subscribers should probably be
         considered as individuals, rather than an organization.
         Firewalls for the whole organization may make little sense in
         this case.

         To summarize, the benefit of a firewall depends upon the nature
         of the organization it protects.  A firewall can be used to
         extend the best available protection within the organization
         across the entire organization, and thus be of benefit to large
         organizations with large numbers of poorly administered hosts.
         A firewall may produce little or no perceived benefit, however,
         to the individuals within an organization who have strong host
         perimeters already.

   3.2  Application-Layer Firewalls

      An application-layer firewall can be represented by the following
      diagram.

          C <---> F <---> S

      Here the requesting client C opens its transport connection to the
      firewall F rather than directly to the desired server S.  One
      mechanism for redirecting C's request to F's IP address rather
      than S's could be based on the DNS.  When C attempts to resolve
      S's name, its DNS lookup would return a "service redirection"
      record (analogous to an MX record) for S.  The service redirection
      record would return the IP address of F.

      C enters some authentication conversation to identify itself to F,
      and specifies its intention to request a specific service from S.
      F then decides if C is authorized to invoke this service.  If C is
      authorized, F initiates a transport layer connection to S and
      begins the operation, passing requests and responses between C and



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      S.

      A major advantage of this scenario over an IP-layer firewall is
      that raw IP datagrams are never passed through the firewall.
      Because the firewall operates at the application layer, it has the
      opportunity to handle and verify all data passing through it, and
      it may be more secure against illicit rendezvous attacks (see
      below).

      Application layer firewalls also have important disadvantages.
      For full benefit, an application level firewall must be coded
      specifically for each application.  This severely limits the
      deployment of new applications.  The firewall also represents a
      new point of failure; if it ceases to be reachable, the
      application fails.  Application layer firewalls also may affect
      performance more than IP-layer firewalls, depending on specific
      mechanisms in use.

   3.3  IP-Layer Firewalls

      Our model of an IP-layer firewall is a multi-ported IP router that
      applies a set of rules to each incoming IP datagram, to decide
      whether it will be forwarded.  It is said to "filter" IP
      datagrams, based on information available in the packet headers.

      A firewall router generally has a set of filtering rules, each of
      which specifies a "packet profile" and an "action".  The packet
      profile specifies values for particular header fields, e.g.,
      source and destination IP address, protocol number, and other
      suitable source and destination identifying information (for
      instance, port numbers).  The set of possible information that may
      be used to match packets is called an "association".  The exact
      nature of an association is an open issue.

      The high-speed datagram forwarding path in the firewall processes
      every arriving packet against all the packet profiles of all
      active rules, and when a profile matches, it applies the
      corresponding action.  Typical actions may include forwarding,
      dropping, sending a failure response, or logging for exception
      tracking.  There may be a default rule for use when no other rule
      matches, which would probably specify a drop action.

      In addition to the packet profile, some firewalls may also use
      some cryptographic information to authenticate the packet, as
      described below in section 3.3.2.






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      3.3.1  Policy Control Level

         This section presents a model for the control of a firewall
         router, with some examples of specific mechanisms that might be
         used.

         1.   A client C attempts to access a service S.  (Client here
              can mean either a person or a process - that also is an
              issue to be resolved.)

         2.   The initiation of access to that service may result in an
              attempt to cross one or more boundaries of protection via
              firewall router(s).

         3.   The policy control level sets filters in the firewall
              router(s), to permit or deny that attempt.

         The policy control level consists of two distinct functions,
         authentication and authorization.  Authentication is the
         function of verifying the claimed identity of a user.  The
         authentication function should be distributed across the
         Internet, so that a user in one organization can be
         authenticated to another organization.  Once a user is
         authenticated, it is then the job of the authorization service
         local to the resource being requested to determine if that user
         is authorized to access that resource.  If authorization is
         granted, the filter in the firewall can be updated to permit
         that access.

         As an aid to understanding the issues, we introduce a
         particular detailed mechanism.  We emphasize that this
         mechanism is intended only as an illustrative example; actual
         engineering of the mechanism will no doubt lead to many
         changes.  Our mechanism is illustrated by the following sketch.
         Here a user wishes to connect from a computer C behind firewall
         F1, to a server S behind firewall F2.  A1 is a particular
         authentication server and Z1 is a particular authorization
         server.

                C <-------> F1 <-------> F2 <-------> S
                 \          /
                  \_____   /
                   \    \ /
                    A1  Z1

         C attempts to initiate its conversation by sending an initial
         packet to S.  C uses a normal DNS lookup to resolve S's name,
         and uses normal IP routing mechanisms.  C's packet reaches



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         firewall router F1, which rejects the packet because it does
         not match any acceptable packet profile.  F1 returns an
         "Authentication Required" error indication to C, including a
         list of authentication/authorization servers that F1 trusts.
         This indication might be a new type of ICMP Destination
         Unreachable packet, or some other mechanism for communicating
         with C.

         When C receives the error indication, authenticates itself with
         A1, one of the authentication servers listed in the error
         indication, after validating A1's identity.  C then requests
         authorization from server Z1 (using a ticket provided by A1),
         informs Z1 of the application it wishes to perform, and
         provides a profile for the packets it wishes to pass through
         F1.  Z1 then performs an authorization function to decide
         whether to allow C to penetrate F1.  If C is to be allowed, Z1
         then informs the firewall F1 to allow packets matching the
         packet profile to pass through the firewall F1.

         After C's packets penetrate F1, they may again be rejected by a
         second firewall F2.  C could perform the same procedures with
         authentication server A2 and authorization server Z2, which F2
         trusts.  This is illustrated by the following schematic diagram
         of the sequence of events.



























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          ----------+--------+--------+------------+------------+----
         |    C     |   A1   |   Z1   |    F1      |     F2     |  S
          ----------+--------+--------+------------+------------+----
         | Sends pkt|        |        |            |            |
         | to S  ----------------------->Intercept;|            |
         |          |        |        | requires   |            |
         |          |        |        |authenticat'n            |
         |   <-------------------------------      |            |
         |Auth'cate |        |        |            |            |
         | C to A1 ---->     |        |            |            |
         |          |Provide |        |            |            |
         |    <------- ticket|        |            |            |
         | Request  |        |        |            |            |
         |authoriz'n|        |        |            |            |
         |   -------------------> Is C|            |            |
         |          |        |allowed?|            |            |
         |          |        |  OK --------->      |            |
         |Resend    |        |        | Set filter |            |
         | first pkt|        |        |            |            |
         | to S -------------------------->(OK)------>Intercept;|
         |          |        |        |            | requires   |
         |          |        |        |            |authenticat'n
         |  <-------------------------------------------        |
         | (Repeat  |        |        |            |            |
         |procedure |        |        |            |            |
         with A2,Z2)|        |        |            |            |
         |  ...     |        |        |            |            |
         |Resend    |        |        |            |            |
         | first pkt|        |        |            |            |
         |   ------------------------------>(OK)--------(OK)------>
         |          |        |        |            |            |
         -----------+--------+--------+------------+------------+----


         Again, we emphasize that this is only intended as a partial
         sketch of one possible mechanism.  It omits some significant
         issues, including the possibility of asymmetric routes (see
         3.3.3 below), and the possibility that the profiles may be
         different in the two directions between C and S.

         We could imagine generalizing this to an arbitrary sequence of
         firewalls.  However, security requires that each of the
         firewalls be able to verify that data packets actually come
         from C.  This packet authentication problem, which is discussed
         in the next section, could be extremely difficult if the data
         must traverse more than one or possibly two firewalls in
         sequence.



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         A firewall router may require re-authentication because:

         *    it has been added to the path by a routing change, or

         *    it has timed out the profile entry, or

         *    it has been newly re-activated, perhaps after a crash that
              lost its list of acceptable profiles.

         If C contacts authentication and authorization servers that S
         trusts, C may utilize tickets given it by these servers when
         initiating its use of S, and avoid re-authenticating itself to
         S.

         Although the authentication server A1 and the authorization
         server Z1 are conceptually separate, they may run on the same
         computer or router or even be separate aspects of a single
         program.  The protocol that C speaks to an An, the protocol
         that C speaks to a Zn, and the protocol that Zn speaks to Fn
         are not specified in these notes.  The authentication mechanism
         used with An and the packet profile required by a firewall Fn
         are considered matters of policy.

      3.3.2  Source Authentication

         We next consider how to protect against spoofing the IP source
         address, i.e., injecting packets that are alleged from come
         from C but do not.  There are three classes of mechanisms to
         prevent such spoofing of IP-level firewalls.  The mechanisms
         outlined here are also discussed in Section 4.3 below.

         o    Packet Profile Only

              The lowest level of security consists of allowing the IP-
              layer firewall to filter packets purely on the basis of
              the packet profile.  This is essentially the approach used
              by filtering routers today, with the addition of (1)
              authentication and authorization servers to control the
              filtering profiles, and (2) the automatic "Authentication
              Required" notification mechanism.  This approach provides
              almost no security; it does not prevent other computers
              from spoofing packets that appear to be transmitted by C,
              or from taking over C's transport level connection to S.

         o    Sealed Packets

              In the second level of security, each packet is "sealed"
              with a secure hash algorithm.  An authentication server Ai



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              chooses a secret and shares it with the source host S and
              also with the authorization server Zi, which shares the
              secret with the firewall Fi.  Every packet that C
              transmits contains a hash value that depends upon both the
              contents of the packet and the secret value.  The firewall
              Fi can compute the same hash function and verify that the
              packet was originated by a computer that knew the shared
              secret.

              This approach does raise issues of how much C trusts Zi
              and Fi.  Since they know C's secret, Zi or Fi could spoof
              C.  If C does not trust all Z's and F's in its path, a
              stronger mechanism (see below) is needed.

              A more difficult problem arises in authenticating C's
              packets when more than one firewall lies in the path.
              Carrying a separate seal for each firewall that is
              penetrated would be costly in terms of packet size.  On
              the other hand, in order to use a single seal, all the
              firewalls would have to cooperate, and this might require
              a much more complex mechanism than the one sketched in the
              previous section.  Morever, it may require mutual trust
              among all of the authentication servers Ai and
              authorization servers Zi; any of these servers could
              undermine all the others.  Another possibility to be
              investigated is to use hop-by-hop rather than end-to-end
              authentication of C's packets.  That is, each firewall
              would substitute into the packet the hash needed by the
              next firewall.

              Multi-firewall source authentication is a difficult
              problem that needs more investigation.

         o    Packet Signatures

              In the third level of security, each packet is "signed"
              using a public/private key algorithm.  C shares its public
              key with Zn, which shares it with Fn.  In this scenario, C
              can safely use one pair of keys for all authorization
              servers and firewalls.  No authorization server or
              firewall can spoof C because they cannot sign packets
              correctly.

              Although packet signing gives a much higher level of
              security, it requires public key algorithms that are
              patented and currently very expensive to compute; their
              time must be added to that for the hash algorithm.  Also,
              signing the hash generally makes it larger.



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      3.3.3 Other Firewall Issues

         o    Performance

              An Internet-layer firewall has the advantage of generality
              and flexibility.  However, filtering introduces a
              potential performance problem.  Performance may depend
              upon the number and position of the packet fields used for
              filtering, and upon the number of rules against which a
              packet has to be matched.

              Denial of service attacks require that the per-packet rule
              matching and the drop path be able to keep up with the
              interface speed.

         o    Multicasting

              To allow multicast traffic to penetrate a firewall, the
              rule that is needed should be supplied by the receiver
              rather than the sender.  However, this will not work with
              the challenge mechanism outlined in Section 3.3.1, since
              "Authentication Required" notifications would be sent to
              the sender, not to the receiver(s).

              Multicast conversations may use any of the three levels of
              security described in the previous section, but all
              firewalls will have to share the same secret with the
              originator of the data stream.  That secret would have to
              be provided to the receivers through other channels and
              then passed to the firewalls at the receivers' initiative
              (in much the same way that resources are reserved at
              receiver's initiative in RSVP).

         o    Asymmetric Routing

              Given a client computer C utilizing a service from another
              computer C through a firewall F: if the packets returning
              from S to C take a different route than packets from C to
              S, they may encounter another firewall F' which has not
              been authorized to pass packets from S to C (unlike F,
              which has been).  F' will challenge S rather than C, but S
              may not have credentials to authenticate itself with a
              server trusted by F'.

              Fortunately, this asymmetric routing situation is not a
              problem for the common case of single homed administrative
              domains, where any asymmetric routes converge at the
              firewall.



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         o    Illicit Rendezvous

              None of these mechanisms prevent two users on opposite
              sides of a firewall from rendezvousing with a custom
              application written over a protocol that may have been
              authorized to run through a firewall.

              For example, if an organization has a policy that certain
              information is sensitive and must not be allowed outside
              its premises, a firewall will not be enough to enforce
              this policy if users are able to attach sensitive
              information to mail and send it outside to arbitrary
              parties.  Similarly, a firewall will not prevent all
              problems with incoming data.  If users import programs and
              execute them, the programs may have Trojan horses which
              disclose sensitive information or modify or delete
              important data.  Executable code comes in many, many
              forms, including PostScript files, scripts for various
              interpreters, and even return addresses for sendmail.  A
              firewall can detect some of these and scan for some forms
              of potentially hazardous code, but it cannot stop users
              from transforming things that look like "data" into
              programs.

              We consider these problems to be somewhat outside the
              scope of the firewall router mechanism.  It is a matter of
              the policies implemented by the organization owning the
              firewalls to address these issues.

         o    Transparency for Security Packets

              For the mechanisms described above to operate, the
              "Authentication Required" notification and the
              authentication/authorization protocol that is used between
              the client computer and the authentication and
              authorization servers trusted by a firewall, must be
              passed by all firewalls automatically.  This might be on
              the basis of the packet profiles involved in security.
              Alternatively, firewall routers might serve as
              application-layer firewalls for these types of
              communications.  They could then validate the data they
              pass to avoid spoofing or illicit rendezvous.

      3.3.4 Firewall-Friendly Applications

         Firewall routers have problems with certain communication
         patterns where requests are initiated by the server, including
         callbacks and multiple connections (e.g., FTP).  It was



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         suggested that it would be useful to have guidelines to
         application designers to help them to build 'firewall-friendly
         applications'.  The following guidelines were suggested:

         1)   no inbound calls (the xterm problem),

         2)   fixed port numbers (no portmapper or tcpmux),

         3)   integral redirection is good (application gateways),

         4)   no redirection in the protocol,

         5)   32 bit sequence numbers that are crypto-strong random #'s,
              and

         6)   fixed length and number of header fields.

         Type fields are good, but they may not be needed if there are
         fixed port numbers.

      3.3.5  Conclusions

         Compared to an application-layer firewall, an IP-layer firewall
         scheme could provide a number of benefits:

         -    No extra authentication is required for end hosts.

         -    A single authentication protocol can be used for all
              intended applications.

         -    An IP-layer firewall causes less performance degradation.

         -    An IP-layer firewall may be able to crash and recover
              state without disturbing open TCP connections.

         -    Routes can shift without disturbing open TCP connections.

         -    There is no single point of failure.

         -    It is independent of application.

         However, there are substantial difficult design issues to be
         solved, particularly in the areas of multiple firewalls,
         assymmetric routes, multicasting, and performance.







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4. SECURE QOS FORWARDING

   When the Internet supports special qualities-of-service (QOS) for
   particular packet flows, there will be a new set of security
   problems.  There will be a need to authenticate and authorize users
   asking for those QOS values that are expensive in network resources,
   and it will be necessary to prevent theft of these resources and
   denial-of-service attacks by others.  This section contains a
   conceptual model for these problems, which we may call secure QOS
   forwarding.  The issues here differ from end-to-end security and
   firewalls, because QOS forwarding security may need to be enforced at
   every router along a path.

   It was noted that this is not a new problem; it was stated and solved
   in a theoretical way in a thesis by Radia Perlman.

   4.1  The Requirement for Setup

      Setup is an essential part of any QOS mechanism.  However, it may
      be argued that there are also good engineering reasons for setup
      in any Internet-layer security mechanism, even without QOS
      support.  In the abstract, one could imagine a pure datagram model
      in which each IP packet separately carried the necessary
      authorizations for all the stages in the forwarding path.
      Realistically, this is not practical, since the security
      information may be both unacceptably large and computationally
      demanding for inclusion in every packet.  This seems to imply the
      need for some form of state setup for security.

      Thus, we presume a two stage process that moves somewhat away from
      the pure datagram model.  In the first stage, the setup stage,
      some state is established in the routers (and other network
      elements) that describes how a subsequent stream of packets is to
      be treated.  In the second stage, the classification stage, the
      arriving packets are matched with the correct state information
      and processed.  The terminology in use today calls these different
      state descriptions "classes", and the process of sorting
      "classification".

      Setup can take many forms.  It could be dynamic, invoked across
      the network by an application as described above.  The setup
      process could also be the manual configuration of a router by
      means of a protocol such as SNMP or remote login.  For example, a
      network link, such as a link across the Atlantic, might be shared
      by a number of users who purchase it jointly.  They might
      implement this sharing by configuring a router with
      specifications, or filters, which describe the sorts of packets
      that are permitted to use each share.  Whether the setup is



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      dynamic or manual, short-lived or semi-permanent, it has the same
      effect: it creates packet classes in the router and defines how
      packets are to be classified as they arrive.

      Much of the current research on extensions to IP for QOS, such as
      realtime service, has assumed an explicit setup phase and a
      classification stage.  The setup stage is accomplished using
      protocols such as RSVP or ST-II, which also specify how the
      subsequent classification is to be done.  Security at the setup
      stage would thus simply be an extension to such a protocol.  It
      should be noted that there are alternative proposals for realtime
      QOS, based on an implicit setup process.

   4.2  Securing the Setup Process.

      To secure the setup process, we require that a setup request be
      accompanied by user credentials that provide a trustworthy
      assurance that the requester is known and is authorized to make
      the request in question.  We refer to the credentials used in the
      setup phase as the high-level identification (HLID).

      A simple version of this authorization would be a password on the
      management interface to a router (the limitations of such a
      password scheme are well known and not the issue here).  In the
      case of setup requests made by individual applications, some
      user-specific authorization must be assumed.

      While there could be any number of ways to organize the HLIDs, the
      objective of scaling suggests that a global framework for user
      naming and authentication would be useful.  The choice of naming
      framework is discussed further in Section 5.  Note that this
      discussion, which concerns controlling access to network resources
      and security devices, is distinct from end-to-end authentication
      and access control; however, the same authentication
      infrastructure could be used for both.

      In general, while significant engineering effort will be required
      to define a setup architecture for the Internet, there is no need
      to develop new security techniques.  However, for the security
      aspects of the classification process, there are significant
      problems related to performance and cost.  We thus focus on that
      aspect of the overall framework in more detail.

      Above, we defined the high-level ID (HLID) as that set of
      information presented as part of a setup request.  There may also
      be a "low-level ID" (LLID), sometimes called a "cookie", carried
      in each packet to drive classification.  In current proposals for
      IP extensions for QOS, packets are classified based on existing



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      packet fields, e.g., source and destination addresses, ports, and
      protocol type.

      It is important to note that the LLID is distinct from the address
      of the user, at least conceptually.  By stressing this distinction
      we make the point that the privileges of the user are not
      determined by the address in use.  If the user's address changes,
      the privileges do not.

      The LLID in a packet acts as a form of tag that is used by some or
      all routers along a path to make decisions about the sort of QOS
      that shall be granted to this packet.  An LLID might refer to a
      data stream between a single source-destination address pair, or
      it might be more general and encompass a range of data streams.
      There is no requirement that the LLID embody a syntax that permits
      a router to discern the QOS parameters that it represents, but
      there also is no prohibition against imposing such a structure.

      We propose that an IP datagram contain one LLID, which can be used
      at various stages of the network to map the packet to a class.  We
      reject the alternative that the packet should have a variable
      number of LLIDs, each one for a different point in the net.
      Again, this is not just a security comment, but it has security
      implications.

      The attributes of the LLID should be picked to match as broad a
      range of requirements as possible.

      *    Its duration (discussed below) must match both the needs of
           the security protocol, balancing robustness and efficiency,
           and the needs of the application, which will have to deal
           with renewal of the setup when the LLID expires.  A useful
           end-node facility would be a service to renew setup requests
           automatically.

      *    The degree of trust must be high enough to meet the most
           stringent requirement we can reasonably meet.

      *    The granularity of the LLID structure must permit packet
           classification into classes fine-grained enough for any
           resource selection in the network.  We should therefore
           expect that each separate stream of packets from an
           application will have a distinct LLID.  There will be little
           opportunity for aggregating multiple streams under one LLID
           or one authenticator.






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   4.3  Validating an LLID

      At a minimum, it is necessary to validate the use of an LLID in
      context, i.e., to ensure that it is being asserted in an
      authorized fashion.  Unauthorized use of an LLID could result in
      theft of service or denial-of-service attacks, where packets not
      emitted by an authorized sender are accorded the QOS treatment
      reserved for that sender (or for a group of which the sender is a
      member).  Thus, use of an LLID should be authenticated by routers
      that make QOS decisions based on that LLID.  (Note that not all
      routers may "pay attention" to the LLID.)

      In principle, the validity of an LLID assertion needs to be
      checked on every packet, though not necessarily at every router;
      it may be possible to restrict the checks to security perimeters.
      At those routers that must validate LLIDs, there is an obvious
      concern over the performance impact.  Therefore, a router may
      adopt a less rigorous approach to LLID validation.  For example, a
      router may elect to sample a data stream and validate some, but
      not all, packets.  It may also elect to forward packets first and
      perform selective validation as a background activity.  In the
      least stringent approach, a router might log selected packets and
      validate them as part of an audit activity much later.

      There are several candidate techniques for validating the use of
      LLIDs.  We have identified three basic techniques, which differ in
      terms of computational performance, bandwidth overhead, and
      effectiveness (resistance to various forms of attack).

      *    Digital Signatures

           The first technique entails the use of public key
           cryptography and digital signatures.  The sender of each
           packet signs the packet (header and payload) by computing a
           one-way hash over the packet and transforming the hash value
           using a private key associated with the LLID.  The resulting
           authenticator value is included in the packet header.  The
           binding between the public key and the LLID is established
           through a connection setup procedure that might make use of
           public keys that enjoy a much longer lifetime.  Using public
           key technology yields the advantage that any router can
           validate a packet, but no router is entrusted with data that
           would enable it to generate a packet with a valid
           authenticator (i.e., which would be viewed as valid by other
           routers.)  This characteristic makes this technique ideal
           from the standpoint of the "principle of least privilege."





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           Public key cryptosystems such as RSA have the advantage that
           validation of a signature is much faster than signing, which
           reduces the router processing burden.  Nonetheless, this
           approach is not likely to be feasible for anything other than
           selective checking by routers, given current public key
           algorithm performance.

      *    Sealing

           The next technique is based on the use of the same type of
           one-way hash function used for digital signatures, but it
           does not require signing the hash value.  Here the sender
           computes a one-way hash with a secret quantity (essentially a
           "key") appended to the packet.  This process is an example of
           what is sometimes referred to more generically as
           cryptographic "sealing."  The inclusion of this key at the
           end of the hash computation results in a hash value that is
           not predictable by any entity not possessing the key.  The
           resulting hash value is the authenticator and is included in
           the packet header.  A router validates a packet by
           recomputing the hash value over the received packet with the
           same secret quantity appended.  If the transmitted hash value
           matches the recomputed hash value, the packet is declared
           valid.  Unlike the signature technique, sealing implies that
           all routers capable of verifying a seal are also capable of
           generating (forging) a seal.  Thus, this technique requires
           that the sender trust the routers not to misuse the key.

           This technique has been described in terms of a single secret
           key shared between the sender and all the routers that need
           to validate packets associated with an LLID.  A related
           alternative strategy uses the same authenticator technique,
           but shares the secret key on a pairwise basis, e.g., between
           the sender and the first router, between the first router and
           the next, etc.  This avoids the need to distribute the secret
           key among a large group of routers, but it requires that the
           setup mechanism enable Router A to convince his neighbor
           (Router B) that Router A is authorized to represent traffic
           on a specific LLID or set of LLIDs.  This might best be done
           by encapsulating the packet inside a wrapper that both ends
           of the link can validate.  Once this strategy is in place, it
           may even be most efficient for routers to aggregate traffic
           between them, providing authentication not on a per-LLID
           basis, since the router pairs are prepared to "trust" one
           another to accurately represent the data stream LLIDs.

           For a unicast data stream, the use of pairwise keying between
           routers does not represent a real change in the trust



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           required of the routers or of the setup mechanism, because of
           the symmetric sharing of the secret key.  However, for a
           multicast connection, this pairwise keying approach is
           superior in that it prevents a router at one point in a
           multicast tree from being able to generate traffic that could
           be inserted at another point in the tree.  At worst, a router
           can generate spurious, but authenticatable, traffic only for
           routers "below" it in the multicast tree.

           Note that the use of network management fault isolation
           techniques, e.g., sampling router traffic statistics at
           different points along a data stream, should permit post hoc
           detection of packet forgery attacks mounted by rogue routers
           along a data stream path.  Use of this technique could
           provide a deterrent to such activity by routers, further
           arguing for the pairwise keying approach.

           The sealing technique is faster than the digital signature
           technique, because the incremental hash calculation
           (including the appended secret quantity) is much faster than
           the cryptographic transformation required to sign a hash.
           The processing burden is symmetric here, i.e., the sender and
           each router devote the same amount of processing power to
           seal a packet and to verify the seal.  Also, a sealed hash
           may be smaller than a signed hash, even if the same function
           is used in both cases.  (This is because the modulus size of
           the public key signature algorithm and any ancillary
           parameters tend to increase the size of the signed hash
           value.)  Moreover, one could use a hash function with a
           "wide" value and truncate that value, if necessary to reduce
           overhead; this option is not available when the authenticator
           is a signed hash value.

           As a variant on this technique, one could imagine a
           "clearinghouse" that would receive, from the sender, the
           secret key used to generate and validate authenticators.  A
           router needing to validate a packet would send a copy of the
           packet to the clearinghouse, which would check the packet and
           indicate to the router whether it was a valid packet
           associated with the LLID in question.  Obviously, this
           variant is viable only if the router is performing
           infrequent, selective packet validation.  However, it does
           avoid the need to share the authenticator secret among all
           the routers that must validate packets.

           For both of these techniques, there is a residual
           vulnerability to denial-of-service attacks based on replay of
           valid packets during the lifetime of a data stream.  Unless



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           packets carry sequence numbers and routers track a sequence
           number window for each data stream, an (external) attacker
           can copy valid packets and replay them.  It may be easiest to
           protect against this form of attack by aggregating all
           traffic between a pair of routers into a single flow and
           providing replay protection for the flow as a whole, rather
           than on a per data stream basis.

      *    Temporary Passwords

           The final technique explored in the workshop takes a very
           different tack to packet validation.  The preceding
           techniques compute a function of the bits in a packet and
           transform that value in a fashion that prevents an intruder
           from generating packets with valid authenticators.  The
           ability to generate packets with valid authenticators for a
           given LLID requires access to a secret value that is
           available only to the sender, or to the sender and to routers
           participating in a given data stream.

           In contrast, this third technique calls for the authenticator
           to be a short term, secret quantity that is carried in the
           packet header, without benefit of further protection.  In
           essence, this technique incorporates a short term "password"
           into each packet header.  This approach, like its
           predecessor, requires that all of the routers validating the
           LLID be privy to this authenticator.  Moreover, the
           authenticator is visible to any other router or other
           equipment along the path, and thus this technique is much
           more vulnerable than the previous ones.

           Here the same authenticator may be applied to all packets
           with the same LLID, since the authenticator is not a function
           of the packet it authenticates.  In fact, this suggests that
           it is feasible to use the LLID as the authenticator.
           However, adopting this tack would not be consistent with the
           two previous techniques, each of which requires an explicit,
           separate authenticator, and so we recommend against this
           optimization.

           Nonetheless, the fact that the authenticator is independent
           of the packet context makes it trivial to generate (forge)
           apparently authentic packets if the authenticator is
           intercepted from any legitimate packet.  Also, if the
           authenticator can be guessed, an attacker need not even
           engage in passive wiretapping to defeat this scheme.  This
           latter observation suggests that the authenticator must be of
           sufficient size to make guessing unlikely, and making the



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           LLID and the authenticator separate further supports this
           requirement.

           The major advantage of this approach is one of performance.
           The authenticator can be validated very quickly through a
           simple comparison.  Consistent with the need to protect
           against guessing attacks, the authenticator need not consume
           a significant amount of space in the packet header.

           The use of a sequence number visible to the routers is an
           interesting technique to explore to make these somewhat
           vulnerable methods more robust.  If each stream (each source
           of packets) numbers its packets, then an intruder attempting
           to use the network resource must delete the legitimate
           packets, which in many cases would be difficult.  Otherwise,
           the router being attacked would notice duplicate sequence
           numbers and similar anomalies.  The exact details of the
           numbering would have to be worked out, since for the
           legitimate stream packets might be lost, which would cause
           holes in the sequence space.

      We do not consider here the issues of collusion, in which a user
      with a given LLID and authenticator deliberately shares this with
      another unauthorized user.  This possibility should be explored,
      to see if there is a practical advantage to this act, and thus a
      real threat.

   4.4  Dynamics of Setup

      o    Duration of LLID's

           A key question in the use of LLIDs is how long they remain
           valid.  At one extreme, they last only a very short time,
           perhaps seconds.  This limits the damage that can be done if
           the authenticator for the LLID is stolen.  At the other
           extreme, LLIDs are semi-permanent, like credit card numbers.
           The techniques proposed above for securing the LLID traded
           strength for efficiency, under the assumption that the peril
           was limited by the limited validity of the LLID.

           The counterbalancing advantage of long-term or semi-permanent
           LLIDs is that it becomes practical to use primitive setup
           techniques, such as manual configuration of routers to
           establish packet classes.  This will be important in the
           short run, since deployment of security and dynamic resource
           allocation protocols may not exactly track in time.





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           We conclude that the correct short-term action is to design
           LLIDs under the assumption that they are fairly short lived,
           and to tolerate, in the short run, a longer period of
           validity.  This would imply that we will get an acceptable
           long-term mechanism in place, which operationally will have a
           lower level of security at first.  As we get better tools for
           automatic setup, we can shorten the duration of validity on a
           individual basis, without replacing mechanism in the packet
           forwarding path.

      o    Setup Latency

           The tradition of the Internet is not to impose any setup
           latency in the communication path between end nodes.  This
           supports the classic datagram model for quick transactions,
           etc., and it is a feature that should be preserved.

           For setup that is done "in advance", either through a
           management interface or by an end-node in the background, the
           issue of latency does not arise.  The latency issue occurs
           for dynamic reservations made in response to a specific
           application request.

           We observe that while latency is a key issue, it is not
           materially influenced by security concerns.  The designers of
           resource reservation protocols such as RSVP and ST-II are
           debating the latency of these protocols today, absent
           security.  Adding an authenticator to the request message
           will increase the processing needed to validate the request,
           and might even imply a message exchange with an
           authentication service, but should not substantially change
           the real time of the setup stage, which might already take
           time on the order of a round-trip delay.  But the design of
           the high level authentication and authorization methods for
           the setup protocol should understand that this process, while
           not demanding at the level of the per-packet processing, is
           still somewhat time-critical.

           One way of dealing with an expensive setup process is to set
           up the request provisionally and perform the validation in
           the background. This would limit the damage from one bad
           setup request to a short period of time.  Note, however, that
           the system is still vulnerable to an attack that uses a
           sequence of setup requests, each of which allows unauthorized
           usage for at least a short period of time.

           Note also that a denial-of-service attack can be mounted by
           flooding the setup process with invalid setup requests, all



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           of which need to be processed and rejected.  This could
           prevent a valid user from setting up any state.  However,
           denial-of-service attacks based upon flooding leave very
           large "finger prints"; they should not normally be an
           important threat.  If it is a problem, it may be possible to
           incorporate a mechanism at the level of setup processing that
           is equivalent to "fair queueing", to limits the damage from a
           flooding attack at the packet level.

   4.5  Receiver-Initiated Setup

      Recent work on a QOS extension for the Internet, embodied in the
      RSVP protocol, uses the model that the receiver will reserve
      resources.  This scheme is consistent with the current IP
      multicast paradigm, which requires the receiver to join the
      multicast group.  The receiver reserves the resources to insure
      that the multicast traffic reaches the receiver with the desired
      QOS.  In this case, it is the credentials (the HLIDs) of the
      receivers that will be presented to the setup phase.

      Note that receiver initiation requires an explicit setup phase.
      Suppose setup were implicit, driven by pre-existing fields in the
      packet.  Then there would be no way to associate a packet with a
      particular receiver, since in multicast, the address of the
      receiver never appears in the packet.

      Further, it is impossible in this case to perform a setup "in
      advance", unless the sender and the receiver are very tightly co-
      ordinated; otherwise, the receiver will not know in advance what
      LLID will be in the packet.  It is certainly impossible, in this
      case, for the receiver to set up "semi-permanent" reservations for
      multicast traffic coming to it.  This, again, is not a security
      issue; the problem exists without adding security concerns, but
      the security architecture must take it into account.

   4.6  Other Issues

      4.6.1  Encrypting Firewalls and Bypass

         Our view of security, both end node and network protection,
         includes the use of firewalls, which partition the network into
         regions of more or less trust.  This idea has something in
         common with the encrypting-firewall model used in the
         military/intelligence community: red (trusted) networks
         partitioned from black (untrusted) networks.  The very
         significant difference is that, in the military model, the
         partition uses an encryption unit that encodes as much as
         possible of the packet for its trip across the black network to



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         another red network.  That is, the purpose of the encryption
         unit, among others, is to provide a very high degree of
         protection against disclosure for data housed within the red
         networks.  In contrast, our version of a firewall is more to
         protect the trusted (red) region of the network from outside
         attacks.  It is concerned both with what comes in and with what
         goes out.  It does permit communication between a node on the
         trusted and nodes in the untrusted parts of the network.

         We would like to be able to adapt our model of secure QOS to
         the case of military-style encrypting firewalls.  However, this
         use of encryption raises a problem with our model of secure
         resource management, discussed above, which was based on a
         two-stage process of setup and classification.  This model is
         problematic because it requires information to pass from the
         red region to the black region in the clear.  This information
         includes both the setup packets themselves, if setup is done
         dynamically from the end node, and the classification fields
         (the LLIDs) in the data packets.  Obviously, this information
         cannot be encrypted when leaving the red region of the network,
         since it would then be meaningless to the black net, so that
         the black network would be unable to make resource allocation
         decisions based on it.

         To make this sort of control scheme work, it is necessary for
         the encryption device to be programmed to permit certain
         packets and fields in packets to pass through the encryptor in
         the clear.  This bypass of the encryption is considered highly
         undesirable.  In a high security situation, the process
         generating the bypassing information might be corrupted, with
         the result that information that should be controlled is
         removed from the secure network by hiding it in the bypassed
         fields of the packets.

         We concluded, however, that this bypass problem is not
         insurmountable.  The key idea, as in all cases of bypass, is to
         limit, rather than wholly outlaw, the information passing in
         the clear.  To limit the information needed for bypass, one can
         either perform the setup as a management function totally
         within the black environment, or divide the process into two
         stages.  The first stage, again totally in the black context,
         defines a limited number of setup situations.  The second stage
         involves sending from the red net a very small message that
         selects one request to be instantiated from among the pre-
         defined set.

         Perhaps the more difficult issue is the LLID in the packet
         header.  If the LLID is an explicit field (as we have discussed



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         so far, but see below), it represents a new field in each
         packet, with perhaps as many as 32 bits.  Again, the solution
         is to limit the way this field can be used.  When the end-node
         performs a setup, it will specify the value of the LLID to be
         used.  This fact can be observed by the red/black encryption
         unit, which can then limit the components of this field to the
         values currently in use.  To further improve the situation, the
         encryption unit might be able to aggregate a number of flows
         onto one flow for the purpose of crossing the black net, which
         would permit a further reduction in the number of distinct
         LLIDs that must escape the red region.

         The details of this proposal, including some important issues
         such as the time duration of LLIDs in this case, must be
         considered further.  However, the initial conclusion that
         bypass can be incorporated into a general resource control
         framework is very encouraging, since it suggests that both
         military and commercial forms of security can be built out of
         the same building blocks.

      4.6.2  The Principle of Consistent Privilege

         A well understood principle of security is the principle of
         least privilege, which states that a system is most robust when
         it is structured to demand the least privilege from its
         components.

         A related rule we observe is the principle of consistent
         privilege.  This can be illustrated simply in the case of
         denial of service, where it is particularly relevant.  For a
         particular route, no assumption of service can be justified
         unless we trust the routers to deliver the packets.  If a
         router is corrupted and will not forward packets, the only
         solution is to find another route not involving this router.
         We do not concern ourselves here with protocols for finding new
         routes in the presence of a corrupted router, since this topic
         is properly part of another topic, securing the network
         infrastructure.  We only observe that either we will get
         service from the router or we will not.  If the router is
         corrupted, it does not matter how it chooses to attack us.
         Thus, as long as the router is part of a forwarding path (most
         generally a multicast forwarding tree), we should not hesitate
         to trust it in other ways, such as by giving it shared resource
         keys or LLID verifiers.

         This illustrates the principle of consistent privilege.  This
         principle is exploited in the scheme for hop-by-hop or pairwise
         use of secrets to validate LLIDs in a multicast tree.  If a



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         single key is issued for the whole tree, then the privilege is
         not consistent.  We only need to trust a router with respect to
         the nodes "below" it in the tree.  If it fails to forward
         traffic, it can affect only those nodes.  But if we give it the
         group key, then it can generate bogus traffic and inject it
         into the tree at any point, affecting traffic for other parts
         of the tree.  If, on the other hand, we use pairwise keys, then
         a corrupt node can only generate bogus traffic with the key for
         traffic it would directly receive, which is the part of the
         tree it could damage anyway.

         Another requirement we must place on the network concerns
         routing.  If a firewall is in place, we must trust the routing
         architecture not to bypass that firewall.  One way to
         accomplish this is to eliminate any physical path between the
         regions other than those that go through the firewall.
         Operational experience will be required to see if this simple
         physical limit is an acceptable constraint.

      4.6.3  Implicit LLID's

         We stress the importance of a strong conceptual distinction
         between the addresses in a packet and the LLID which is used to
         classify the packet.  The conceptual distinction is important,
         but under limited circumstances it may be possible to overload
         some of the packet fields and create an LLID from the current
         packet header.  For example, current packet classifiers for
         IPv4, which are not secure but which seem to work for
         classifying the packets into service classes, use a number of
         the packet fields together as a form of LLID: the source and
         destination IP addresses and ports plus the protocol type.

         This sort of "implicit" LLID must be short-lived, especially if
         the host can change its IP address as it moves.  But if the
         LLID is established by some sort of dynamic setup protocol, it
         should be possible reestablish the LLID as needed.

         The current IPv4 header has no authenticator field to validate
         the LLID.  An authenticator field could be optionally carried
         in an option; adding it gives robustness to network
         reservations.  Any of the schemes described above for creating
         an authenticator could be used, except that if the simple
         password-style authenticator is used, it must be an explicit
         separate field, since the LLID cannot be picked randomly.







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      4.6.4  Security without Setup

         As we describe this architecture, the setup phase is an
         essential part of the sequence.  This suggests that the current
         Internet, which has no setup protocols, cannot be secured
         against denial-of-service attacks.  It is important to explore
         the limits of this point.  As we stressed above, setup can
         occur in many ways.  Routers today offer management options to
         classify packets based on protocol types and other fields found
         in the header, and to use this classification to create a few
         fair queueing classes that can prevent one class from
         overloading the net to the exclusion of the others.

         There are two problem here.  The first is that for a setup done
         using a management interface, the secret that is shared among
         the source and the routers to validate the LLID must remain
         valid for a long time, and it must be manually configured.  The
         second problem is that the granularity of the categories may be
         coarse.  However, it has been proposed, in a thesis by Radia
         Perlman, that a router might create a separate fair queueing
         class implicitly for each source address.  This approach, which
         uses the addresses as an implicit LLID, must have some form of
         authenticator for robustness.  But if the LLID can be trusted,
         this scheme provides classification of traffic based only on an
         implicit setup operation.  The granularity of classification is
         not sufficient to provide any QOS distinction.  The only
         objective is to prevent the traffic from one source from
         flooding the net to the exclusion of another.

      4.6.5  Validating Addresses

         We make a claim here that if the LLID and the addresses in the
         packet are conceptually distinct, and if there is a suitable
         means to validate the LLID, then there is no reason to validate
         the addresses.  For example, a packet constructed with a false
         source address does not seem to represent any security problem,
         if its LLID can be validated.

         An exception to this might possibly lie in communication with
         mobile hosts, but it will require a complete model of threats
         and requirements in the mobile environment to be sure.
         However, we make the claim, as a starting point for discussion,
         that if LLIDs are distinguished from addresses, many of the
         security concerns with mobility are mitigated and perhaps
         removed.  This point should be validated by more detailed
         consideration of the mobility problem.





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   4.6  Conclusions

      a)   It is important to conceptually separate a LLID (Low-Level
           IDentifier) carried in a packet from addresses in the packet.

      b)   There will be a single LLID carried in each packet.  Although
           this might imply some additional state in the routers than if
           multiple LLIDs were used, using only one LLID choice is more
           scalable.

      c)   Hop-by-hop LLID authentication mechanisms might provide a
           highly scalable approach that limits the distribution of
           secrets.  However, the robustness limitations must be
           investigated thoroughly.

      d)   Statistical sampling or after-the-fact detection mechanisms
           may be employed by routers to address performance concerns.

5. AN AUTHENTICATION SERVICE

   The purpose of an authentication service is simply to verify names,
   or more precisely to verify the origin of "messages".  It differs
   from the authorization service, which determines what services are
   available to an authenticated name.  We expect that authentication
   will be an Internet-wide service, while authorization will be
   specific to the resources to which access is being authorized.

   This "identification" function can be used in several contexts, for
   example:

   *    One-time passwords: "it is really <huitema@inria.fr> that is
        responding to this challenge".

   *    Access to a firewall: "it is really <huitema@inria.fr> that is
        trying to send data to host-A at port-a".

   There are many Internet objects that we may want to name, e.g.,:

           domain names:   sophia.inria.fr

           machine names:  jupiter.inria.fr

           service names:  www.sophia.inria.fr
                           (in fact, a data base)

           users:          huitema@sophia.inria.fr





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           processes:      p112.huitema@sophia.inria.fr
                           p112.sophia.inria.fr

           universal resource locators:
                           http//www.sophia.inria.fr:222/tmp/foobar

   One could be tempted to believe that the authentication service will
   only be concerned with naming humans, as only humans are
   "responsible"; a process obtains some access rights because it is
   acting on behalf of a person.  However, this is too reductive and
   potentially misleading.  We may have to authenticate "machines" or
   hardware components.  For example:

   *    When a machine boots it needs to access resources for
        configuring itself, but it is not yet "used" by a person; there
        is no user.

   *    On a "distributed processor", component CPUs may need to
        authenticate each other.

   Machines do differ from users; machines cannot keep their "secrets"
   in the same way that people do.  However, there is a big value in
   having a simple and extensible name space.

   5.1  Names and Credentials

      We make the hypothesis that the authorization services will
      generally use "access control lists" (ACLs), i.e., some definition
      of a set of authorized users.  A compact way to represent such a
      set would be to allow "wildcard" authorizations, e.g., "anybody at
      <Bellcore.com>", or "any machine at <INRIA.FR>".  The
      authentication service should be designed to facilitate the
      realization of the authorization service and should support
      "wildcards".

      However, wildcards are not general enough.  Assuming that we have
      a hierarchical name space, a wildcarded entry is limited to the
      naming hierarchy.  For example, a name like
      <huitema@sophia.inria.fr> could be matched by the wildcard
      <*@sophia.inria.fr> or <*.inria.fr> or <*.fr>.  This is useful as
      long as one stays at INRIA, but does not solve the generic
      problem.  Suppose that an IETF file server at CNRI is to be
      accessible by all IAB members: its ACL will explicitly list the
      members by name.

      The classic approach to naming, as exemplified in the X.500 model,
      is to consider that people have "distinguished names".  Once one
      has discovered such a name through some "white pages" service, can



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      use it as an access key in a global directory service.

      An individual may acquire authorizations from a variety of
      sources.  Using a pure, identity-based access control system, the
      user would have to acquire multiple identities (i.e.,
      distinguished names), corresponding to the roles in which she is
      authorized to access different services.  We discuss this approach
      in the next section.

      An alternative approach is for the user to have a very small
      number of identities, and to have the grantors of authorizations
      issue (signed) credentials granting permissions to the user,
      linked to her ID.  These additional signed credentials are known
      as "capabilities".  The user can then establish her identity
      through a generic identity credential, e.g., an X.509 certificate,
      and can establish authorization by presenting capabilities as
      required.  This is somewhat analogous to a person acquiring credit
      cards linked to the name on a driver's license, and presenting the
      appropriate credit card, plus the license for picture verification
      of identity.

   5.2  Identity-Based Authorization

      Let's open the wallet of an average person: we find several
      "credit cards" in it.  We all have many "credit cards", e.g.,
      company cards, credit cards, airline frequent flyers memberships,
      driver licenses.  Each of these cards is in fact a token asserting
      the existence of a relation: the bank certifies that checks
      presented by the bearer will be paid, the traffic authorities
      certifies that the bearer has learned how to drive, etc.  This is
      an example of identity-based authorization, in which an individual
      is given different names corresponding to different relations
      entered into by that individual.

      If we imagine that the name space is based upon DNS (domain)
      names, then for example, the person mentioned above could be
      authenticated with the names:

              customer@my-big-bank.com

              customer@frequent-flyer.airline.com

      The model we used here is that "the name is an association". This
      is consistent with name verification procedures, in which that one
      builds a "chain of trust" between the user and the "resource
      agent".  By following a particular path in the trust graph, one
      can both establish the trust and show that the user belongs to an
      "authorized group".



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      The existence of "multiple names" for a person may or may not
      imply the existence of an "equivalence" relation.  It may be
      useful to know that <huitema@sophia.inria.fr> and
      <huitema@iab.isoc.org> are two names for the same person, but
      there are many cases where the user does not want to make all his
      tokens visible.

   5.3  Choosing Credentials

      Let's consider again the example of Christian Huitema accessing a
      file at CNRI.  He will have to interact with INRIA's outgoing
      firewall and with CNRI's incoming controls.  Regardless of whether
      authorization depends upon capabilities or upon multiple
      association names, a different credential may be needed in each
      firewall on the path.  For example, assuming multiple names are
      used, he will use an INRIA name, <huitema@sophia.inria.fr>, to be
      authorized by INRIA to use network resources, and he will use an
      IAB name, <huitema@iab.isoc.org>, to access the file server.  Thus
      comes an obvious problem: how does he choose the credential
      appropriate to a particular firewall?  More precisely, how does
      the computer program that manages the connection discover that it
      should use one credential in response to INRIA's firewall
      challenge and another in response to CNRI's request?

      There are many possible answers.  The program could simply pass
      all the user's credentials and let the remote machine pick one.
      This works, but poses some efficiency problems: passing all
      possible names is bulky, looking through many names is long.
      Advertising many names is also very undesirable for privacy and
      security reasons: one does not want remote servers to collect
      statistics on all the credentials that a particular user may have.

      Another possibility is to let the agent that requests an
      authorization pass the set of credentials that it is willing to
      accept, e.g., "I am ready to serve CNRI employees and IAB
      members".  This poses the same privacy and security problems as
      the previous solutions, although to a lesser degree.  In fact, the
      problem of choosing a name is the same as the generic "trust path"
      model.  The name to choose is merely a path in the authentication
      graph, and network specialists are expected to know how to find
      paths in graphs.

      In the short term, it is probably possible to use a "default name"
      or "principal name", at least for local transactions, and to count
      on the user to "guess" the credential that is required by remote
      services.  To leave the local environment we need only the local
      credentials; to contact a remote server we need only the
      destination credentials.  So we need one or maybe two credentials,



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      which may be derived from the destination.  It will be very often
      the case that the generic credential is enough; then wildcards;
      then "FTP provided" tokens.

6. OTHER ISSUES

   6.1  Privacy and Authentication of Multicast Groups

      Multicast applications are becoming an increasingly important part
      of Internet communications.  Packet voice, video and shared
      whiteboard can be powerful productivity tools for users.  For
      these applications to have maximum value to their users, a variety
      of security services will be required.

      Existing techniques are directly applicable to providing privacy
      for a private teleconference.  If each member of the conference
      shares a single key for a symmetric encryption algorithm (such as
      DES), existing point-to-point security techniques can be extended
      to protect communication within the group from outsiders.

      However, slight modifications to existing techniques are required
      to accommodate the multicast environment.  Each packet will
      require independent cryptographic processing to ensure that
      packets from multiple sources can be independently decrypted by
      the numerous receivers, particularly in the presence of lost
      packets.  N-party authentication and key management will be
      required to establish the shared key among the proper group
      members.  This can be done by extending existing two-party key
      management techniques pairwise.  For example, the conference
      manager may provide the key to each member following individual
      authentication; for example, this could be implemented trivially
      using PEM technology.  The overhead experienced by each host
      computer in the conference will be similar to that of existing
      point-to-point encryption applications,  This overhead is be low
      enough that, today, software encryption can offer adequate
      performance to secure whiteboard and voice traffic, while hardware
      encryption is adequate for video.

      The nature of multicast communication adds an additional
      requirement.  Existing multicast conferences provide gradual
      degradation in quality as the packet loss rate increases.  To be
      acceptable, authentication protocols must tolerate lost packets.
      Techniques to accomplish this efficiently need to be developed.
      One initial sketch is outlined below.  Engineering work will be
      required to validate the practicality of this approach.






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      The use of symmetric encryption provides the members of the
      conference with effective protection from outsiders.  However,
      because all members of the conference share a single key, it does
      not provide a means of authenticating individual conference
      members.  In principle, existing techniques, based on one-way hash
      functions coupled with digital signatures based on asymmetric
      encryption algorithms, can provide individual authentication.
      One-way hash functions such as MD5 are comparable in cost to
      symmetric encryption.  However, digital signatures are
      considerably more costly, both in computation and in communication
      size.  The degree of overhead depends on the quality of
      authentication required.

      In summary, realtime authentication at the granularity of group
      membership is easy and cheap, but individual authentication is
      costly in time and space.  Over time, the costs of both
      communications and processing are expected to decline.  It is
      possible that this will help make authentication at the level of
      individual conference participants.  There are two conflicting
      trends:  (1) increasing CPU speeds to provide symmetric
      encryption, and (2) increasing communication data rates.  If both
      technologies increase proportionally, there will be no net gain,
      at least if the grain size is measured in terms of bits, rather
      than as a period in seconds.

      The group felt that the correct approach to end-to-end controls is
      the use of encryption, as discussed above.  The alternative is to
      control the ability of a user to join a multicast group as a
      listener, or as a speaker.  However, we are not comfortable with
      the level of assurance that we can offer if we attempt to ensure
      end-to-end semantics using these means.  Any passive penetration
      of the network, i.e., any wire-tap, can compromise the privacy of
      the transmitted information.  We must acknowledge, however, that
      problems with deployment of encryption code and hardware, and
      especially problems of export controls, will create a pressure to
      use the tools described in Section 4 to implement a form of end-
      to-end control.  Such a decision would raise no new issues in
      security technology.  The shared key now used for encrypting the
      data could instead be used as the basis for authenticating a
      multicast group join request.  This would require modification of
      the multicast packet format, but nothing more.  Our concern is not
      the technical difficulty of this approach, but the level of
      assurance we can offer the user.








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   6.2  Secure Plug-and-Play a Must

      Plug-and-play is the ability to plug a new device into a network
      and have it obtain the information it needs to communicate with
      other devices, without requiring any new configuration
      information.  Secure plug-and-play is an important Internet
      requirement, and a central architectural issue is whether it can
      be made to scale well.

      For plug-and-play operation, a new machine that is "plugged" into
      the network needs to:

      (1)  Obtain an locator so it can communicate with other devices

      (2)  Register or obtain a name to be identified by (e.g., machine
           name)

      (3)  Discover services available on the network (e.g., printers,
           routers, file servers, etc.)

      (4)  Discover other systems on the network so it can communicate
           with them.

      In some environments, no security mechanisms are required because
      physical security and local knowledge of the users are sufficient
      protection.  At the other end of the spectrum is a large network
      with many groups of users, different types of outside connections,
      and levels of administrative control.  In such environments,
      similar plug-and-play capabilities are needed, but the new device
      must be "authenticated" before it can perform these functions.  In
      each step in the discovery process the new device must
      authenticate itself prior to learning about services.

      The steps might be:

      -    Obtain a HLID from a smart card, smart disk, or similar
           device.

      -    Authenticate itself with the first plug-and-play server using
           its HLID, to register a name and to find the location of
           other services.

      -    Discover services available on the network (e.g., printers,
           routers, file servers, etc.) based on its HLID.

      -    Discover other systems on the network so it can communicate
           with them.




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      The problem of taking a system out of the box and initially
      configuring it is similar to the problem of a mobile or portable
      machine  that a human wants to connect to a local network
      temporarily in order to receive services on that network.  How can
      the local network authenticate the human (and therefore the
      human's machine) and know which services this visiting machine is
      permitted to use?

      The human must be endowed with a high level identifier (HLID)
      which acts as his/her passport and can be verified by the local
      network.  This high level identifier must be globally unique and
      registered/assigned by some recognized authority.

      When the human plugs the machine onto a local net, the machine
      identifies itself to the net with the human's high level
      identifier.  If local net has a policy of permitting anyone to
      plug and play on its network, it will ignore the HLID and assign
      an address (locator), permitting the visitor unrestricted access
      and privileges.  More likely, the local net will authenticate the
      HLID prior to granting the visitor an address or any privileges.

      At this point, the HLID has only authenticated the visitor to the
      local network; the issue of which services or resources the
      visitor is entitled to use has not been addressed.  It is
      desirable to develop a low-overhead approach to granting
      authentications to new users. This will help in the case of
      visitors to a site, as well as new users joining a facility.

   6.3  A Short-Term Confidentiality Mechanism

      Authentication has customarily been achieved using passwords.  In
      the absence of active attacks, the greatest threat to computer
      system security may be the ease with which passwords can be
      "snooped" by the promiscuous monitoring of shared-media networks.
      There are known security techniques for achieving authentication
      without exposing passwords to interception, for example the
      techniques implemented in the well-known Kerberos system.
      However, authentication systems such as Kerberos currently operate
      only in isolation within organizational boundaries.  Developing
      and deploying a global authentication infrastructure is an
      important objective, but it will take some years.  Another useful
      approach in the short term is the use of a challenge-response user
      authentication scheme (e.g., S/Key).

      One of the groups explored another interim approach to guarding
      passwords: introducing a readily-used confidentiality mechanism
      based on an encrypted TCP connection.  This would operate at the
      IP level to encrypt the IP payload, including the TCP header, to



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      allow the nature as well of the contents of the communication to
      be kept private.  It could be implemented to provide either
      "strict" protection (the connection fails if the other side cannot
      decrypt your data stream) or "loose" protection (falling back to
      non-private TCP if decryption fails).

      Loose protection would allow interoperability with older hosts in
      a seamless (non-user-intrusive) manner.

      One-time keys may be exchanged during the SYN handshake that
      starts the TCP connection.  Using one-time keys avoids a need for
      infrastructure support and does not require trust between the
      organizations on the two ends of the connection.  Tieing the key
      exchange to the SYN handshake will avoid the possibility of having
      the connection fully open without knowing the state of encryption
      on both ends of the connection.  Although it may still be
      theoretically possible to intercept the SYN exchange and subvert
      the connection by an active "man-in-the-middle" attack, in
      practice such attacks on TCP connections are quite difficult
      unless the routing protocols have been subverted.

      The keys could be exchanged using a new option that specifies the
      key exchange protocol, the data encryption algorithm, and the key
      to be used to decrypt the connection.  It could be possible to
      include multiple options in the same SYN segment, specifying
      different encryption models; the far end would then need to
      acknowledge the option that it is willing to use.  In this case,
      the lack of an acknowledgement would imply disinterest in
      decrypting the datastream.  If a loose privacy policy were in
      force, the connection could continue even without an
      acknowledgment.  The policy, "strict" or "loose", would be set by
      either the user or the default configuration for the machine.

      One must however observe that a TCP option can carry only a
      limited amount of data.  Efficient protection against crypto-
      analysis of the Diffie-Hellmann scheme may require the use of a
      very long modulus, e.g., 1024 bits, which cannot be carried in the
      40 bytes available for TCP options.  One would thus have either to
      define an "extended option" format or to implement encryption in a
      separate protocol layered between TCP and IP, perhaps using a
      version of "IP security".  The detailed engineering of such a
      solution would have to be studied by a working group.

      A TCP connection encryption mechanism such as that just outlined
      requires no application changes, although it does require kernel
      changes.  It has important drawbacks, including failure to provide
      privacy for privacy for UDP, and the great likelihood of export
      control restrictions.  If Diffie-Hellman were used, there would



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      also be patent issues.

7. CONCLUSIONS

   As a practical matter, security must be added to the Internet
   incrementally.  For example, a scheme that requires, as a
   precondition for any improvement, changes to application code, the
   DNS, routers and firewalls all at once will be very hard to deploy.
   One of the reasons the workshop explored schemes that are local to
   the IP layer is that we surmise that they might be easier to deploy
   in practice.

   There are two competing observations that must shape planning for
   Internet security.  One is the well known expression: "the best is
   the enemy of the good."  The other is the observation that the
   attacks are getting better.

   Finally, it should noted that the principle of least privilege, which
   was mentioned above, may be in contradiction to the principle of
   least cost.

   7.1  Suggested Short-Term Actions

      The general recommendation for short-term Internet security policy
      was that the IETF should make a list of desirable short-term
      actions and then reach out to work with other organizations to
      carry them out.  Other organizations include regionals, which may
      be in a good position to provide site security counseling services
      to their customers, vendors and other providers, and other
      societies.  We should also give input to the US government to
      influence their posture on security in the direction desired by
      the community.

      A suggested preliminary list of short-term actions was developed.

      o    Perform external diagnostic security probes

           Organizations should be encouraged to use CRACK and other
           tools to check the robustness of their own passwords.  It
           would also be useful to run a variety of security probes from
           outside.  Since this is a very sensitive issue, some care
           needs to be taken to get the proper auspices for such
           probing.








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           Useful probe tools include:

               ISS: Klaus (GA)
               SATAN: Farmer Venema
               ICEPICK: NRL

      o    Determine Security-Risk Publication Channels

           What channels should be used for disseminating information of
           security risks?

      o    Encourage use of one-time passwords.

           Available packages: S/Key, SecurID, Enigma, Digital Pathways.

      o    Develop and publish guidelines for protocol developers, for
           security-friendliness and firewall-friendliness.

      o    Control topology to isolate threats

      o    Set privacy policy:

           *    Always

           *    As much as possible

      o    Bring Site Security Handbook up to date

      o    Support use of Kerberos

      The subject of the "Clipper chip" came up several times, but there
      was not sufficient discussion of this very complex issue for this
      grouip to reach a recommendation.  It has been observed that there
      are a number of quite differing viewpoints about Clipper.

           o    Some people accept the government's Clipper proposal,
                including key escrow by the US government and the
                requirement that encryption be in hardware.

           o    Some people don't mind key escrow by the government in
                principle, but the object to the hardware requirement.

           o    Some people don't mind key escrow in principle, but
                don't want the government to hold the keys.  They would
                be comfortable with having the organization which owns
                the data hold the keys.

           o    Some people don't want key escrow at all.



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           o    Some people don't mind the hardware or the key escrow,
                but they don't think this will be acceptable to other
                countries and thus will not work internationally.

      This report takes no position on any of these viewpoints.

   7.2  Suggested Medium-Term Actions

      These actions require some protocol design or modification;
      however, they use existing security technology and require no
      research.

      o    Authentication Protocol

           There is a problem of the choice of technology.  Public key
           technology is generally deemed superior, but it is patented
           and can also induce relatively long computations.  Symmetric
           key technology (Needham-Schroeder algorithm, as used in
           Kerberos) has some technical drawbacks but it is not
           patented.  A system based on symmetric keys and used only for
           authentication would be freely exportable without being
           subject to patents.

      o    Push Kerberos

           Engineering is needed on Kerberos to allow it to interoperate
           with mechanisms that use public key cryptography.

      o    Push PEM/RIPEM/PGP...

      o    Develop an authenticated DNS

      o    Develop a key management mechanism

      o    Set up a certificate server infrastructure

           Possible server mechanisms include the DNS, Finger, SNMP,
           Email, Web, and FTP.

      o    Engineer authentication for the Web


   7.3  Suggested Long-Term Actions

      In this category, we have situations where a threat has been
      identified and solutions are imaginable, but closure has not been
      reached on the principles.




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      o    Executable Apps

      o    Router sabotage counter-measures

      o    Prevent Byzantine routing.

      o    Proxy Computing

      o    Decomposition of computers

      o    Are there "good" viruses?








































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APPENDIX A -- Workshop Organization

   The following list of attendees indicates also the breakout group to
   which they were assigned.

   Breakout Groups

   Group I.1 Leader:
   1 Christian Huitema, INRIA        (IAB)

   1 Steve Bellovin, AT&T
   1 Bob Braden, ISI                 (IAB)
   1 John Curran, NEARNET
   1 Phill Gross, ANS                (IETF/IAB)
   1 Stev Knowles, FTP Software      (Internet AD)
   1 Barry Leiner, USRA              (IAB)
   1 Paul Mockapetris, ISI
   1 Yakov Rekhter, IBM              (IAB)
   1 Dave Sincoskie, Bellcore        (IAB)

   Group I.2 Leader:
   2 Steve Crocker, TIS              (Security AD)

   2 Jon Crowcroft
   2 Steve Deering, PARC
   2 Paul Francis, NTT
   2 Van Jacobson, LBL
   2 Phil Karn, Qualcomm
   2 Allison Mankin, NRL             (Transport AD, IPng AD)
   2 Radia Perlman, Novell
   2 John Romkey, ELF                (IAB)
   2 Mike StJohns, ARPA              (IAB)

   Group I.3 Leader:
   3 Dave Clark, MIT

   3 Deborah Estrin, USC
   3 Elise Gerich, Merit             (IAB)
   3 Steve Kent, BBN                 (IAB)
   3 Tony Lauck, DEC                 (IAB)
   3 Tony Li, CISCO
   3 Bob Hinden, Sun                 (IESG->IAB liaison, Routing AD)
   3 Jun Murai, WIDE                 (IAB)
   3 Scott Shenker, PARC
   3 Abel Weinrib, Bellcore

   The following were able to attend only the third day, due to a
   conflicting ISOC Board of Trustees meeting:



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     Scott Bradner, Harvard           (IPng AD)
     Jon Postel, ISI                  (IAB)

   The workshop agenda was as follows.

      Tues Feb 8
          9:00 - 10:30  Plenary
              Discuss facilities, meeting goals, agenda, organization.
              Establish some minimal common understandings.  Assign
              scenarios to Breakout I groups.

          10:30 - 13:00  Breakout I meetings
              Each breakout group examine one or more scenarios and
              formulate a list of design questions.  Lunch available on
              11th floor.

          13:00 - 15:00  Plenary
              Report, discuss.  Collate and shorten list of design
              issues.  Organize Breakout II groups to work on these
              issues.

          15:00 - 17:30  Breakout IIa meetings
              Work on design issues.

      Wed Feb 9
           9:00 - 10:00   Plenary
              Report, discuss.

          10:00 - 13:30  Breakout IIb meetings
              More work on design questions, develop list of
              requirements.

          13:30 - 14:30  Plenary
              Report, discuss.

          15:30 - 17:30  Breakout III groups

      Thurs Feb 10
          9:00 - 9:30 Plenary

          9:30 - 11:00 Breakout Groups (wrapup)

          11:00 - 12:00 Plenary
              Discuss possible short-term security recommendations

          13:00 - 14:00  Plenary --  Discuss short-term security issues

          14:00 - 14:30  Plenary --  Presentation by Steve Bellovin



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          14:30 - 16:00  Plenary --  Long- and Medium-term
                                     Recommendations

   The following scenarios were used as a starting point for
   discussions.  It distinguished security-S (security as a service to
   the end systems) from security-M, security as a mechanism to support
   other services.  The workshop was intended to be primarily concerned
   with interactions among the following different *services*:

   o    Security-S

   o    Routing

   o    Multi-destination delivery (mcast-S)

   o    Realtime Packet scheduling (realtime)

   o    Mobility

   o    Accounting

        (and maybe large-scale?)

   These categories were then applied to the following scenarios:

   S1.  Support a private teleconference among mobile hosts connected to
        the Internet.  [Security-S, mcast-S, realtime, mobility]

   S2.  The group in S1 is 1/3 the Internet, i.e., there are VERY severe
        scaling problems.  [Security-S, mcast-S, realtime, mobility,
        large-scale]

   S3.  Charge for communication to support a video teleconference.
        [Accounting, realtime, mcast-S]

   S4.  I am travelling with my laptop. I tune in to radio channel IP-
        RADIO, pick-up the beacon and start using it.  Who gets the
        bill?  Why do they believe this is me?  Is "me" a piece of
        hardware (IP address) or a certified user (PEM certificate)?
        [Mobility, accounting (, realtime, mcast-S)]

   S5.  A Politically Important Person will mcast an Internet
        presentation, without danger of interruptions from the audience.

   S6.  The travel industry wants to use Internet to deliver tickets to
        customer premises directly in a secure way, but the customer has
        only dial-up capability.  [Security-S, mobility]




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   S7.  I am traveling with my laptop and this friendly host is running
        the autoconfiguration protocol. I immediately get an address as
        "mac1.friendly.host.com".   (What is the difference between my
        laptop and a bona fide autoconfigured local station?)
        [Security-S, mobility]

   S8.  Multiple people are connected to a subnetwork providing mobility
        (e.g., cellular, packet radio). The subnetwork is connected to
        multiple places in the "fixed" backbone. How can routing be done
        efficiently?  [Routing, mobility]

   The following scenarios that were suggested do not fit into the
   primary thrust of the workshop, generally because they are single-
   issue topics.  Most of them are pure security topics and are
   concerned with the security perimeter.  The last two do not fit into
   our classification system at all.

   S9.  XYZ corporation has two major branches on opposite ends of the
        world, and they want to communicate securely over the Internet,
        with each branch having IP-level connectivity to the other (not
        through application gateways).

   S10. I am visiting XYZ corporation, with my laptop.  I want to
        connect it to their LAN to read my email remotely over the
        Internet.  Even though I am inside their corporate firewall,
        they want to be protect their machines from me.

   S11. XYZ corporation is trying to use the Internet to support both
        private and public networking.  It wants to provide full
        connectivity internally between all of its resources, and to
        provide public access to certain resources (analogous of
        anonymous ftp servers)

   S12. The travel industry wants to use Internet to deliver tickets to
        customer premises directly in a secure way.

   S13. Some hacker is deliberately subverting routing protocols,
        including mobile and multicast routing.  Design counter
        measures.

   S14. Part of the Internet is running IPv4 and part is running IPng
        (i.e.  the Internet is in transition). How can we assure
        continued secure operation through such a transition?

   S15. A corporation uses ATM to connect a number of its sites. It also
        uses Internet. It wants to make use of the ATM as its primary
        carrier, but also wants to utilize other networking technologies
        as appropriate (e.g., mobile radio).  It wants to support all



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        media (data, voice, video).


Security Considerations

   This memo is entirely concerned with security issues.

Authors' Addresses

   Bob Braden [Editor]
   USC Information Sciences Institute
   4676 Admiralty Way
   Marina del Rey, CA 90292-6695

   Phone: (310) 822-1511
   EMail: Braden@ISI.EDU


   David Clark
   MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
   545 Technology Square
   Cambridge, MA 02139-1986

   Phone: 617-253-6003
   EMail: ddc@lcs.mit.edu


   Steve Crocker
   Trusted Information Systems, Inc.
   3060 Washington Road (Rte 97)
   Glenwood, MD 21738

   Phone: (301) 854-6889
   EMail: crocker@tis.com


   Christian Huitema
   INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis
   2004 Route des Lucioles
   BP 109
   F-06561 Valbonne Cedex
   France

   Phone:  +33 93 65 77 15
   EMail: Christian.Huitema@MIRSA.INRIA.FR






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