North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: key change for TCP-MD5

  • From: Iljitsch van Beijnum
  • Date: Mon Jun 19 09:46:02 2006 
On 19-jun-2006, at 14:32, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
I just submitted an I-D on TCP-MD5 key change. Until it shows up in the
official repository, see
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/draft-bellovin- keyroll2385-00.txt
Here's the abstract:


                The TCP-MD5 option is most commonly used to secure
                BGP sessions between routers.  However, changing
                the long-term key is difficult, since the change
                needs to be synchronized between different
                organizations.
                We describe single-ended strategies that will permit
                (mostly) unsynchronized key changes.





Comments welcome.




I wonder how long that policy will hold. (-:



Ok:



First of all, I applaud this effort.



There doesn't really seem to be a way to introduce a new key other
than to just to agree on a time. I'm not sure this is good enough.



Wouldn't it be better to exchange some kind of "time to change keys"
message? This could simply be a new type of BGP message that hold a
key ID. Obviously the capability to send and receive these messages
must be negotiated when the session is created, but still, I think
the extra complexity is worth it because it allows for much more
robust operation.



And is NANOG now officially an IETF working group...?



Iljitsch