One document matched: draft-ietf-anima-grasp-08.xml
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<rfc category="std" docName="draft-ietf-anima-grasp-08" ipr="trust200902">
<front>
<title abbrev="GRASP">A Generic Autonomic Signaling Protocol (GRASP)</title>
<author initials="C." surname="Bormann" fullname="Carsten Bormann">
<organization>Universität Bremen TZI</organization>
<address>
<postal>
<street>Postfach 330440</street>
<city>D-28359 Bremen</city>
<country>Germany</country>
</postal>
<email>cabo@tzi.org</email>
</address>
</author>
<author fullname="Brian Carpenter" initials="B. E." surname="Carpenter" role="editor">
<organization abbrev="Univ. of Auckland"/>
<address>
<postal>
<street>Department of Computer Science</street>
<street>University of Auckland</street>
<street>PB 92019</street>
<city>Auckland</city>
<region/>
<code>1142</code>
<country>New Zealand</country>
</postal>
<email>brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com</email>
</address>
</author>
<author fullname="Bing Liu" initials="B." surname="Liu" role="editor">
<organization>Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd</organization>
<address>
<postal>
<street>Q14, Huawei Campus</street>
<street>No.156 Beiqing Road</street>
<city>Hai-Dian District, Beijing</city>
<code>100095</code>
<country>P.R. China</country>
</postal>
<email>leo.liubing@huawei.com</email>
</address>
</author>
<!---->
<date day="30" month="October" year="2016"/>
<abstract>
<t>This document establishes requirements for a signaling protocol that enables autonomic
devices and autonomic service agents to dynamically discover peers, to synchronize
state with them, and to negotiate parameter settings mutually with them. The document
then defines a general protocol for discovery, synchronization and negotiation,
while the technical objectives for specific scenarios are to be described in
separate documents. An Appendix briefly discusses existing protocols with
comparable features.</t>
</abstract>
</front>
<middle>
<section anchor="intro" title="Introduction">
<t>The success of the Internet has made IP-based networks bigger and
more complicated. Large-scale ISP and enterprise networks have become more and more
problematic for human based management. Also, operational costs are growing quickly.
Consequently, there are increased requirements for autonomic behavior in the networks.
General aspects of autonomic networks are discussed in
<xref target="RFC7575"/> and <xref target="RFC7576"/>. </t>
<t>One approach is to largely decentralize the logic of network management by migrating it
into network elements. A reference model for autonomic networking on this basis is given in
<xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-reference-model"/>. The reader should consult this document
to understand how various autonomic components fit together.
In order to fulfil autonomy, devices that embody Autonomic Service Agents
(ASAs, <xref target="RFC7575"/>)
have specific signaling requirements. In particular they need to discover each other,
to synchronize state with each other,
and to negotiate parameters and resources directly with each other.
There is no limitation on the types of parameters and resources concerned,
which can include very basic information needed for addressing and routing,
as well as anything else that might be configured in a conventional non-autonomic network.
The atomic unit of discovery, synchronization or negotiation is referred to as a technical
objective, i.e, a configurable parameter or set of parameters
(defined more precisely in <xref target="terms"/>).</t>
<t>Following this Introduction, <xref target="reqts"/> describes the requirements
for discovery, synchronization and negotiation.
Negotiation is an iterative process, requiring multiple message exchanges forming
a closed loop between the negotiating entities. In fact, these entities are
ASAs, normally but not necessarily in different network devices.
State synchronization, when needed,
can be regarded as a special case of negotiation, without iteration.
<xref target="highlevel"/> describes a behavior model for a protocol
intended to support discovery, synchronization and negotiation. The
design of GeneRic Autonomic Signaling Protocol (GRASP) in <xref target="Overview"/>
of this document is mainly based on this behavior model. The relevant capabilities
of various existing protocols are reviewed in <xref target="current"/>.</t>
<t>The proposed discovery mechanism is oriented towards synchronization and
negotiation objectives. It is based on a neighbor discovery process, but
also supports diversion to off-link peers. There is no assumption of any
particular form of network topology. When a device starts up with no pre-configuration,
it has no knowledge of the topology. The protocol itself is capable of
being used in a small and/or flat network structure such as a small
office or home network as well as a professionally managed network.
Therefore, the discovery mechanism needs to be able to allow a device
to bootstrap itself without making any prior assumptions about network
structure. </t>
<t>Because GRASP can be used to perform a decision process among distributed
devices or between networks, it must run in a secure and strongly authenticated
environment.
</t>
<t>It is understood that in realistic deployments, not all devices will
support GRASP. It is expected that some autonomic service agents will directly
manage a group of non-autonomic nodes, and that other non-autonomic nodes
will be managed traditionally. Such mixed scenarios
are not discussed in this specification.</t>
</section>
<!-- intro -->
<section anchor="reqts" title="Requirement Analysis of Discovery, Synchronization and Negotiation">
<t>This section discusses the requirements for discovery, negotiation
and synchronization capabilities. The primary user of the protocol is an autonomic service
agent (ASA), so the requirements are mainly expressed as the features needed by an ASA.
A single physical device might contain several ASAs, and a single ASA might manage
several technical objectives. If a technical objective is managed by several ASAs,
any necessary coordination is outside the scope of the signaling protocol itself.</t>
<t>Note that requirements for ASAs themselves, such as the processing of Intent
<xref target="RFC7575"/> or interfaces for coordination between ASAs are out of scope
for the present document.</t>
<section title="Requirements for Discovery">
<t>D1. ASAs may be designed to manage anything, as required in
<xref target="synchreq"/>. A basic requirement
is therefore that the protocol can represent and discover any
kind of technical objective among arbitrary subsets of participating nodes.</t>
<t>In an autonomic network we must assume that when a device starts up
it has no information about any peer devices, the network structure,
or what specific role it must play. The ASA(s) inside the device are
in the same situation. In some cases, when a new application session
starts up within a device, the device or ASA may again lack
information about relevant peers. For example, it might be necessary to set
up resources on multiple other devices, coordinated and matched to
each other so that there is no wasted resource. Security settings
might also need updating to allow for the new device or user.
The relevant peers may be different for different technical
objectives. Therefore discovery needs to be repeated as often as
necessary to find peers capable of acting as counterparts for each
objective that a discovery initiator needs to handle.
From this background we derive the next three requirements:</t>
<t>D2. When an ASA first starts up, it has no knowledge of the specific network to
which it is attached.
Therefore the discovery process must be able to support any network scenario,
assuming only that the device concerned is bootstrapped from factory condition.
</t>
<t>D3. When an ASA starts up, it must require no configured location information about any
peers in order to discover them.</t>
<t>D4. If an ASA supports multiple technical objectives, relevant peers may be different
for different discovery objectives, so discovery needs to be performed separately to
find counterparts for each objective. Thus, there must be a mechanism by
which an ASA can separately discover peer ASAs for each of the
technical objectives that it needs to manage, whenever necessary.</t>
<t>D5. Following discovery, an ASA will normally perform negotiation
or synchronization for the corresponding objectives. The design
should allow for this by conveniently linking discovery to negotiation
and synchronization. It may provide an optional mechanism to
combine discovery and negotiation/synchronization in a single call.</t>
<t>D6. Some objectives may only be significant on the local link,
but others may be significant across the routed network and require
off-link operations. Thus, the relevant peers might be immediate
neighbors on the same layer 2 link, or they might be more distant and
only accessible via layer 3. The mechanism must therefore provide both
on-link and off-link discovery of ASAs supporting specific technical
objectives.</t>
<t>D7. The discovery process should be flexible enough to allow for
special cases, such as the following:
<list style="symbols">
<!-- <t>In some networks, as mentioned above, there will be some
hierarchical structure, at least for certain synchronization or negotiation
objectives, but this is unknown in advance. The discovery protocol must therefore
operate regardless of hierarchical structure, which is an attribute of
individual technical objectives
and not of the autonomic network as a whole. A special case of discovery is that each
device must be able to discover its hierarchical superior for each
such objective that it is capable of handling. This is part of the more
general requirement to discover off-link peers.</t> -->
<t>During initialisation, a device must be able to establish mutual trust
with the rest of the network and join an authentication mechanism. Although
this will inevitably start with a discovery action, it is a special case
precisely because trust is not yet established. This topic
is the subject of <xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-bootstrapping-keyinfra"/>.
We require that once trust has been established for a device,
all ASAs within the device inherit the device's credentials and are also trusted.</t>
<t>
Depending on the type of network involved, discovery of other
central functions might be needed, such as
<!--a source of Intent distribution <xref target="RFC7575"/> or -->
the Network Operations
Center (NOC) <xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-stable-connectivity"/>.
The protocol must be capable of supporting such discovery during initialisation,
as well as discovery during ongoing operation.</t>
</list></t>
<t>D8. The discovery process must not generate excessive traffic and
must take account of sleeping nodes in the case of a constrained-node network
<xref target="RFC7228"/>. </t>
<t>D9. There must be a mechanism for handling stale discovery results.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="synchreq" title="Requirements for Synchronization and Negotiation Capability">
<t>As background, consider the example of routing protocols, the closest
approximation to autonomic networking already in widespread use. Routing
protocols use a largely autonomic model based on distributed devices
that communicate repeatedly with each other. The focus
is reachability, so current routing protocols mainly consider simple
link status, i.e., up or down, and an underlying assumption is that
all nodes need a consistent view of the network topology in order
for the routing algorithm to converge. Thus, routing is
mainly based on information synchronization between peers,
rather than on bi-directional negotiation. Other information,
such as latency, congestion, capacity, and particularly unused capacity,
would be helpful to get better path selection and utilization rate, but
is not normally used in distributed routing algorithms. Additionally,
autonomic networks need to be able to manage many more dimensions,
such as security settings, power saving, load balancing, etc.
Status information and traffic metrics need to be shared between
nodes for dynamic adjustment of resources and for monitoring purposes.
While this might be achieved by existing protocols when they are
available, the new protocol needs to be able to support parameter
exchange, including mutual synchronization, even when no negotiation
as such is required. In general, these parameters do not apply to all
participating nodes, but only to a subset. </t>
<t>SN1. A basic requirement for the protocol is therefore the
ability to represent, discover, synchronize and negotiate almost any
kind of network parameter among selected subsets of participating nodes.</t>
<t>SN2. Negotiation is a request/response process that must be guaranteed to terminate
(with success or failure) and if necessary it must contain tie-breaking rules for
each technical objective that requires them. While these must be defined specifically
for each use case, the protocol should have some general mechanisms in support of loop
and deadlock prevention, such as hop count limits or timeouts.</t>
<t>SN3. Synchronization might concern small groups of nodes or very large groups.
Different solutions might be needed at different scales. </t>
<t>SN4. To avoid "reinventing the wheel", the protocol should be able to encapsulate the
data formats used by existing configuration protocols (such as NETCONF/YANG)
in cases where that is convenient.</t>
<t>SN5. Human intervention in complex situations is costly and error-prone.
Therefore, synchronization or negotiation of parameters without human
intervention is desirable whenever the coordination of multiple devices can improve
overall network performance. It therefore follows that the protocol, as part of the
Autonomic Networking Infrastructure, should be capable of running in any device
that would otherwise need human intervention. The issue of running in constrained nodes
is discussed in <xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-reference-model"/>.</t>
<t>SN6. Human intervention in large networks is often replaced by use of a
top-down network management system (NMS). It therefore follows that
the protocol, as part of the Autonomic Networking Infrastructure, should
be capable of running in any device that would otherwise be managed by
an NMS, and that it can co-exist with an NMS, and with protocols
such as SNMP and NETCONF.</t>
<t>SN7. Some features are expected to be implemented by individual ASAs,
but the protocol must be general enough to allow them:
<list style="symbols">
<t>Dependencies and conflicts: In order to
decide a configuration on a given device, the device may need
information from neighbors. This can be established through the
negotiation procedure, or through synchronization if that
is sufficient. However, a given item in a neighbor
may depend on other information from its own neighbors, which may
need another negotiation or synchronization procedure to obtain or decide.
Therefore, there are potential dependencies and conflicts among negotiation or synchronization
procedures. Resolving dependencies and conflicts is a matter for the individual ASAs involved.
To allow this, there need to be clear boundaries and convergence
mechanisms for negotiations. Also some mechanisms are needed to avoid
loop dependencies. In such a case, the protocol's role is limited to
bilateral signaling between ASAs. </t>
<t>Recovery from faults and identification of faulty devices should be
as automatic as possible. The protocol's role is limited
to the ability to handle discovery, synchronization and negotiation at
any time, in case an ASA detects an anomaly such
as a negotiation counterpart failing.</t>
<t>Since the goal is to minimize human intervention, it is necessary that the
network can in effect "think ahead" before changing its parameters. One aspect
of this is an ASA that relies on a knowledge base to predict network behavior.
This is out of scope for the signaling protocol. However, another aspect is
forecasting the effect of a change by a "dry run" negotiation before actually
installing the change. This will be an application of the protocol rather than
a feature of the protocol itself. </t>
<t>Management logging, monitoring, alerts and tools for intervention are required.
However, these can only be features of individual ASAs.
Another document <xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-stable-connectivity"/> discusses how
such agents may be linked into conventional OAM systems via an Autonomic Control Plane
<xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-autonomic-control-plane"/>. </t>
</list></t>
<t>SN8. The protocol will be able to deal with a wide variety of
technical objectives, covering any type of network parameter.
Therefore the protocol will need a flexible and easily extensible format for
describing objectives. At a later stage it may be desirable to adopt an explicit
information model. One consideration is whether to adopt an existing
information model or to design a new one. </t>
</section>
<section title="Specific Technical Requirements">
<t>T1. It should be convenient for ASA designers to define new technical objectives
and for programmers to express them, without excessive impact on
run-time efficiency and footprint. In particular, it should be possible for ASAs
to be implemented independently of each other as user space programs rather than as kernel
code. The classes of device in which the protocol
might run is discussed in <xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-reference-model"/>.
</t>
<t>T2. The protocol should be easily extensible in case the initially defined discovery,
synchronization and negotiation mechanisms prove to be insufficient. </t>
<t>T3. To be a generic platform, the protocol payload format should be
independent of the transport protocol or IP version.
In particular, it should be able to run over IPv6 or IPv4.
However, some functions, such as multicasting on
a link, might need to be IP version dependent. In case of doubt, IPv6 should
be preferred.</t>
<t>T4. The protocol must be able to access off-link counterparts via routable addresses,
i.e., must not be restricted to link-local operation.</t>
<t>T5. It must also be possible for an external discovery mechanism
to be used, if appropriate for a given technical objective. In other words, GRASP discovery
must not be a prerequisite for GRASP negotiation or synchronization. </t>
<t>T6. The protocol must be capable of supporting multiple simultaneous operations,
especially when wait states occur.</t>
<t>T7. Intent: There must be
provision for general Intent rules to be applied by all devices in
the network (e.g., security rules, prefix length, resource sharing
rules). However, Intent distribution might not use the signaling
protocol itself, but its design should not exclude such use. </t>
<t>T8. Management monitoring, alerts and intervention:
Devices should be able to report to a monitoring
system. Some events must be able to generate operator alerts and
some provision for emergency intervention must be possible (e.g.
to freeze synchronization or negotiation in a mis-behaving device). These features
might not use the signaling protocol itself, but its design should not exclude such use.</t>
<t>T9. The protocol needs to be fully secured against forged messages and
man-in-the middle attacks, and secured as much as reasonably possible
against denial of service attacks. It needs to be capable of
encryption in order to resist unwanted monitoring<!--, although this
capability may not be required in all deployments-->. However, it is not
required that the protocol itself provides these security features; it may
depend on an existing secure environment. </t>
</section>
</section>
<!-- reqts -->
<section anchor="Overview" title="GRASP Protocol Overview">
<section anchor="terms" title="Terminology">
<t>The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in
<xref target="RFC2119"/> when they appear in ALL CAPS. When these words
are not in ALL CAPS (such as "should" or "Should"), they have their
usual English meanings, and are not to be interpreted as <xref target="RFC2119"/> key words.</t>
<t>This document uses terminology defined in <xref target="RFC7575"/>.</t>
<t>The following additional terms are used throughout this document:
<list style="symbols">
<t>Autonomic Device: identical to Autonomic Node.</t>
<t>Discovery: a process by which an ASA discovers peers
according to a specific discovery objective. The discovery results
may be different according to the different discovery objectives.
The discovered peers may later be used as negotiation
counterparts or as sources of synchronization data. </t>
<t>Negotiation: a process by which two ASAs interact
iteratively to agree on parameter settings that best satisfy the
objectives of both ASAs.</t>
<t>State Synchronization: a process by which ASAs
interact to receive the current state of parameter
values stored in other ASAs. This is a special case of negotiation
in which information is sent but the ASAs do not request
their peers to change parameter settings. All other definitions
apply to both negotiation and synchronization. </t>
<t>Technical Objective (usually abbreviated as Objective):
A technical objective is a configurable parameter or set of parameters
of some kind, which occurs in three contexts: Discovery, Negotiation
and Synchronization. In the protocol, an objective is represented by an
identifier and if relevant a value. Normally, a given objective will not
occur in negotiation and synchronization contexts simultaneously.
<list style="symbols">
<t>One ASA may support multiple independent objectives.</t>
<t>The parameter described by a given objective is naturally based
on a specific service or function or action. It may in principle be
anything that can be set to a specific logical, numerical or string
value, or a more complex data structure, by a network node.
That node is generally expected to contain an ASA
which may itself manage subsidiary non-autonomic nodes.</t>
<t>Discovery Objective: if a node needs to synchronize or negotiate
a specific objective but does not know a peer that supports this objective,
it starts a discovery process. The objective is called a Discovery Objective
during this process.</t>
<!-- A discovery objective may be in one-to-one correspondence
with a synchronization objective or a negotiation objective, or it may
correspond to a certain group of such objectives. -->
<t>Synchronization Objective: an objective whose specific technical content
needs to be synchronized among two or more ASAs. </t>
<t>Negotiation Objective: an objective whose specific technical content
needs to be decided in coordination with another ASA. </t>
</list></t>
<t>Discovery Initiator: an ASA that spontaneously starts discovery
by sending a discovery message referring to a specific discovery
objective.</t>
<t>Discovery Responder: a peer that either contains an ASA supporting the discovery objective
indicated by the discovery initiator, or caches the locator(s) of the ASA(s) supporting
the objective. The locator(s) are indicated in a Discovery Response,
which is normally sent by the protocol kernel, as described later.</t>
<t>Synchronization Initiator: an ASA that spontaneously starts synchronization
by sending a request message referring to a specific synchronization
objective.</t>
<t>Synchronization Responder: a peer ASA which responds with the
value of a synchronization objective.</t>
<t>Negotiation Initiator: an ASA that spontaneously starts
negotiation by sending a request message referring to a specific
negotiation objective.</t>
<t>Negotiation Counterpart: a peer with which the Negotiation
Initiator negotiates a specific negotiation objective.</t>
</list></t>
</section>
<section title="High Level Deployment Model">
<t>It is expected that a GRASP implementation will reside in an autonomic node
that also contains both the appropriate security environment, preferably the
Autonomic Control Plane (ACP) <xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-autonomic-control-plane"/>,
and one or more Autonomic Service Agents (ASAs). In the minimal case of a single-purpose
device, these three components might be fully integrated. A more common model is expected
to be a multi-purpose device capable of containing several ASAs. In this case it is expected
that the ACP, GRASP and the ASAs will be implemented as separate processes, which are
probably multi-threaded to support asynchronous and simultaneous operations. It is expected that GRASP
will access the ACP by using a typical socket interface. A well defined
Application Programming Interface (API) will be needed
between GRASP and the ASAs. In some implementations, ASAs would run in user
space with a GRASP library providing the API, and this library would in turn
communicate via system calls with core GRASP functions running in kernel mode.
For further details of possible deployment models, see
<xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-reference-model"/>.
</t>
<t>A GRASP instance must be aware of its network interfaces, and of its own global-scope
and link-local addresses. In the presence of the ACP, such information will be available from
the adjacency table discussed in <xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-reference-model"/>.
In other cases, GRASP must determine such information for itself. Details depend on the operating system.</t>
<t>Because GRASP needs to work whatever happens, especially during bootstrapping
and during fault conditions, it is essential that every implementation is as
robust as possible. For example, discovery failures, or any kind of socket error
at any time, must not cause irrecoverable failures in GRASP itself, and must
return suitable error codes through the API so that ASAs can also recover.
</t>
<t>GRASP must always start up correctly after a system restart. All run time error
conditions, and events such as address renumbering, network interface failures,
and CPU sleep/wake cycles, must be handled in such a way that GRASP will still
operate correctly and securely (<xref target="reqsec"/>) afterwards.</t>
<t>An autonomic node will normally run a single instance of GRASP, used by multiple ASAs.
However, scenarios where multiple instances of GRASP
run in a single node, perhaps with different security properties, are not excluded. In this
case, each instance MUST listen independently for GRASP link-local multicasts in order for
discovery and flooding to work correctly.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="highlevel" title="High Level Design Choices">
<t>This section describes a behavior model and design considerations for
GRASP, supporting discovery, synchronization and negotiation, to
act as a platform for different technical objectives.</t>
<!-- <t>NOTE: An earlier version of this protocol used type-length-value
formats and was prototyped by Huawei
and the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.</t> -->
<t><list style="symbols">
<t>A generic platform<vspace blankLines="1"/>
The protocol is designed as a generic platform, which
is independent from the synchronization or negotiation contents. It takes
care of the general intercommunication between
counterparts. The technical contents will vary according to the
various technical objectives and the different pairs of
counterparts.<vspace blankLines="1"/></t>
<t>The protocol is expected to form part of an Autonomic Networking Infrastructure
<xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-reference-model"/>. It will provide services to
ASAs via a suitable application programming interface (API), which will reflect the
protocol elements but will not necessarily be in one-to-one correspondence to
them. This API is out of scope for the present document.<vspace blankLines="1"/></t>
<t>It is normally expected that a single main instance of GRASP will exist in an autonomic
node, and that the protocol engine and each ASA will run as independent
asynchronous processes. However, separate GRASP instances may exist for security
reasons (<xref target="secinst"/>).<vspace blankLines="1"/></t>
<t>Security infrastructure and trust relationship<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Because this negotiation protocol may directly
cause changes to device configurations and bring significant
impacts to a running network, this protocol
is assumed to run within an existing secure environment with
strong authentication. As a design choice, the protocol itself is not
provided with built-in security functionality.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
On the other hand, a limited negotiation model
might be deployed based on a limited trust relationship. For
example, between two administrative domains, ASAs might also
exchange limited information and negotiate some particular
configurations based on a limited conventional or contractual
trust relationship.<vspace blankLines="1"/></t>
<t>Discovery, synchronization and negotiation are designed together.<vspace blankLines="1"/>
The discovery method and the synchronization and negotiation methods
are designed in the same way and can be combined when this is
useful. These processes can also be performed independently when appropriate.
<list style="symbols">
<t>GRASP discovery is always available for efficient discovery of GRASP peers
and allows a rapid mode of operation described in <xref target="discmech"/>.
For some objectives, especially those concerned with application layer
services, another discovery mechanism such as the future DNS Service
Discovery <xref target="RFC7558"/> or
Service Location Protocol <xref target="RFC2608"/>
MAY be used. The choice is left to the designers of individual
ASAs.
</t>
</list><vspace blankLines="1"/></t>
<t>A uniform pattern for technical contents<vspace blankLines="1"/>
The synchronization and negotiation contents are defined
according to a uniform pattern. They could be carried either in simple
binary format or in payloads described by a
flexible language. The basic protocol design uses the Concise
Binary Object Representation (CBOR) <xref target="RFC7049"/>.
The format is extensible for unknown future requirements. <vspace blankLines="1"/></t>
<t>A flexible model for synchronization<vspace blankLines="1"/>
GRASP supports bilateral synchronization, which could be used
to perform synchronization among a small number of nodes.
It also supports an unsolicited flooding mode when large groups of nodes,
possibly including all autonomic nodes, need data for the same
technical objective.
<list style="symbols">
<t>There may be some network parameters for which a more traditional flooding
mechanism such as DNCP <xref target="RFC7787"/>
<!-- <xref target="I-D.stenberg-anima-adncp"/> --> is
considered more appropriate. GRASP can coexist with DNCP.
</t>
</list><vspace blankLines="1"/></t>
<t>A simple initiator/responder model for negotiation<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Multi-party negotiations are too complicated to be modeled and
there might be too many dependencies among the parties to converge
efficiently. A simple initiator/responder model is more feasible
and can complete multi-party negotiations by indirect steps.
<vspace blankLines="1"/></t>
<t>Organizing of synchronization or negotiation content<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Naturally, the technical content will be
organized according to the relevant function or service. The
content from different functions or services is kept
independent from each other. They are not combined into a
single option or single session because these contents may be
negotiated or synchronized with different counterparts or may be
different in response time. Thus a normal arrangement would be a
single ASA managing a small set of closely related objectives,
with a version of that ASA in each relevant autonomic node. Further
discussion of this aspect is out of scope for the current document.
<vspace blankLines="1"/></t>
<!-- Paragraph moved to the reference model:
<t>Self-aware network device<vspace blankLines="1"/>Every autonomic
device will be loaded with various functions and ASAs and will be
aware of its own capabilities, typically decided by the hardware,
firmware or pre-installed software. Its exact role may depend on
Intent and on the surrounding network behaviors, which may include
forwarding behaviors, aggregation properties, topology location, bandwidth,
tunnel or translation properties, etc. The surrounding topology will
depend on the network planning. Following an initial discovery phase,
the device properties and those of its neighbors are the
foundation of the synchronization or negotiation behavior of a specific
device. A device and its ASAs have no pre-configuration for the
particular network in which it is installed.<vspace blankLines="1"/></t>
-->
<t>Requests and responses in negotiation procedures<vspace blankLines="1"/>
The initiator can negotiate with
its relevant negotiation counterpart ASAs, which may be
different according to the specific negotiation objective. It can request
relevant information from the negotiation counterpart so that it
can decide its local configuration to give the most coordinated
performance. It can request the negotiation counterpart to make a
matching configuration in order to set up a successful
communication with it. It can request certain simulation or
forecast results by sending some dry run conditions.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>Beyond the traditional yes/no answer, the
responder can reply with a suggested alternative value for the objective
concerned. This would start a bi-directional negotiation
ending in a compromise between the two ASAs.<vspace blankLines="1"/></t>
<t>Convergence of negotiation procedures<vspace blankLines="1"/>
To enable convergence, when a responder makes a
suggestion of a changed condition in a negative reply, it should
be as close as possible to the original request or previous
suggestion. The suggested value of the third or later negotiation
steps should be chosen between the suggested values from the last
two negotiation steps. In any case there must be a mechanism to
guarantee convergence (or failure) in a small number of steps, such
as a timeout or maximum number of iterations.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
<list style="symbols">
<t>End of negotiation<vspace blankLines="1"/>
A limited number of rounds, for example three, or a timeout, is needed
on each ASA for each negotiation objective. It may be an implementation
choice, a pre-configurable parameter, or network Intent.
These choices might vary between different types of ASA.
Therefore, the definition of each negotiation objective MUST clearly specify
this, so that the negotiation can always be terminated properly.
<vspace blankLines="1"/></t>
<t>Failed negotiation<vspace blankLines="1"/>There must be a
well-defined procedure for concluding that a negotiation cannot
succeed, and if so deciding what happens next (deadlock
resolution, tie-breaking, or revert to best-effort
service). Again, this MUST be specified for individual
negotiation objectives, as an implementation choice, a pre-configurable
parameter, or network Intent.</t>
</list></t>
<t>Extensibility<vspace blankLines="1"/>
GRASP does not have a version number. In most cases new semantics will be added
by defining new synchronization or negotiation objectives. However, the
protocol could be extended by adding new message types and options in future.
</t>
</list></t>
</section>
<section title="Quick Operating Overview">
<t>GRASP is expected to run as an operating system core module,
providing an API (such as <xref target="I-D.liu-anima-grasp-api"/>) to interface to
less privileged ASAs.
Thus ASAs may operate without special privilege, unless they need it for
other reasons (such as configuring IP addresses or manipulating routing
tables).
</t><t>
The GRASP mechanisms used by the ASA are built around GRASP objectives
defined as data structures
containing administrative information such as the objective's unique
name, and its current value. The format and size of the value is
not restricted by the protocol, except that it must be possible to
serialise it for transmission in CBOR, which is no
restriction at all in practice.
</t><t>
The GRASP provides the following mechanisms:
<list style="symbols">
<t>A discovery mechanism (M_DISCOVERY, M_RESPONSE), by which an ASA can
discover other ASAs supporting a given objective.
</t><t>
A negotiation request mechanism (M_REQ_NEG), by which an ASA can start
negotiation of an objective with a counterpart ASA. Once a negotiation has
started, the process is symmetrical, and there is a negotiation step message
(M_NEGOTIATE) for each ASA to use in turn. Two other functions support negotiating
steps (M_WAIT, M_END).
</t><t>
A synchronization mechanism (M_REQ_SYN), by which an ASA can request the
current value of an objective from a counterpart ASA. With this,
there is a corresponding response function (M_SYNCH) for an ASA that
wishes to respond to synchronization requests.
</t><t>
A flood mechanism (M_FLOOD), by which an ASA can cause the current value of
an objective to be flooded throughout the AN so that any ASA can
receive it.</t>
</list></t>
</section>
<section title="GRASP Protocol Basic Properties and Mechanisms">
<section anchor="reqsec" title="Required External Security Mechanism">
<t>The protocol SHOULD run within a secure Autonomic Control Plane (ACP)
<xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-autonomic-control-plane"/>. The ACP is assumed
to carry all messages securely, including link-local multicast if possible.
A GRASP implementation MUST verify whether the ACP is operational. </t>
<t>If there is no ACP, the protocol
MUST use another form of strong authentication and SHOULD use a form
of strong encryption. TLS <xref target="RFC5246"/>
is RECOMMENDED for this purpose, based on a local Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
<xref target="RFC5280"/> managed within the autonomic network itself. The details
of such a PKI and how its boundary is established are out of scope for this document.
DTLS <xref target="RFC6347"/> MAY be used but since GRASP operations usually
involve several messages this is not expected to be advantageous. </t>
<t>The ACP, or in its absence the local PKI, sets the boundary within which nodes
are trusted as GRASP peers. A GRASP implementation MUST refuse to execute GRASP
synchronization and negotiation functions if there is neither an operational
ACP nor an operational TLS or DTLS environment. </t>
<t>Link-local multicast is used for discovery messages. <!-- It is preferred that the
ACP will handle these and distribute them securely to all on-link ACP nodes only.
However, in the absence of an ACP they cannot be secured. -->
Responses to discovery messages MUST be secured, with one exception mentioned in the next section.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="secinst" title="Limited Security Instances">
<t>This section describes three cases where additional instances of GRASP are appropriate.</t>
<t>1) As mentioned in <xref target="highlevel"/>, some GRASP operations might be
performed across an administrative domain boundary by mutual agreement. Such operations
MUST be confined to a separate instance of GRASP with its own copy of all GRASP
data structures. Messages MUST be authenticated and SHOULD be encrypted.
TLS is RECOMMENDED for this purpose.</t>
<t>2) During initialisation, before a node has joined the applicable trust
infrastructure, <xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-bootstrapping-keyinfra"/>,
it is impossible to secure messages.
Thus, the security bootstrap process needs
to use insecure GRASP discovery, response and flood messages.
Such usage MUST be limited to link-local operations and MUST be confined
to a separate insecure instance of GRASP with its own copy of all GRASP
data structures. This instance is nicknamed DULL - Discovery Unsolicited Link Local.</t>
<t>The detailed rules for the DULL instance of GRASP are as follows:
<list style="symbols">
<t>An initiator MUST only send Discovery or Flood Synchronization link-local
multicast messages with a loop count of 1. A responder MAY send a Discovery Response
message. Other GRASP message types MUST NOT be sent.</t>
<t>A responder MUST silently discard any message whose loop count is not 1.</t>
<t>A responder MUST silently discard any message referring to a GRASP Objective that is
not directly part of the bootstrap creation process.</t>
<t>A responder MUST NOT relay any multicast messages.</t>
<t>A Discovery Response MUST indicate a link-local address.</t>
<t>A Discovery Response MUST NOT include a Divert option.</t>
<t>A node MUST silently discard any message whose source address is not link-local.</t>
</list></t>
<t>3) During ACP formation <xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-autonomic-control-plane"/>, a separate
instance of GRASP is used, with unicast messages secured by TLS, and with its own copy of
all GRASP data structures. This instance is nicknamed SONN - Secure Only Neighbor Negotiation.</t>
<t>
The detailed rules for the SONN instance of GRASP are as follows:
<list style="symbols">
<t>Any type of GRASP message MAY be sent.</t>
<t>An initiator MUST send any Discovery or Flood Synchronization link-local
multicast messages with a loop count of 1.</t>
<t>A responder MUST silently discard any Discovery or Flood Synchronization message whose loop count is not 1.</t>
<t>A responder MUST silently discard any message referring to a GRASP Objective that is
not directly part of the ACP creation process.</t>
<t>A responder MUST NOT relay any multicast messages.</t>
<t>A Discovery Response MUST indicate a link-local address.</t>
<t>A Discovery Response MUST NOT include a Divert option.</t>
<t>A node MUST silently discard any message whose source address is not link-local.</t>
</list></t>
</section>
<section anchor="trans" title="Transport Layer Usage">
<t>GRASP discovery and flooding messages are designed for use over link-local multicast
UDP. They MUST NOT be fragmented, and therefore MUST NOT exceed the link MTU size.
Nothing in principle prevents them from working over some other method of
sending packets to all on-link neighbors, but this is out of scope for the
present specification. </t>
<t>All other GRASP messages are unicast and could in principle run over any transport protocol.
An implementation MUST support use of TCP. It MAY support use of another transport protocol.
However, GRASP itself does not provide for error detection or retransmission. Use of an
unreliable transport protocol is therefore NOT RECOMMENDED. </t>
<t>Nevertheless, when running within a secure ACP on reliable infrastructure,
UDP MAY be used for unicast messages not exceeding the minimum IPv6 path MTU;
however, TCP MUST be used for longer messages. In other words, IPv6 fragmentation
is avoided. If a node receives a UDP message but the reply is too long, it
MUST open a TCP connection to the peer for the reply. Note that when
the network is under heavy load or in a fault condition, UDP might become
unreliable. Since this is when autonomic functions are most necessary,
automatic fallback to TCP MUST be implemented. The simplest implementation
is therefore to use only TCP. In particular, to guarantee interoperability
during bootstrap and startup, using TCP for discovery responses is strongly
advised.</t>
<t>When running without an ACP, TLS MUST be supported and used by default, except
for link-local multicast messages. DTLS MAY be supported as an alternative
but the details are out of scope for this document. Transport protocols
other than TCP and UDP are also out of scope for this document.</t>
<t>For link-local multicast, the GRASP protocol listens to the well-known
GRASP Listen Port (<xref target="Constants"/>).
For unicast transport sessions used for discovery responses, synchronization and
negotiation, the ASA concerned normally listens on its own dynamically assigned ports,
which are communicated to its peers during discovery. However, a minimal implementation
MAY use the GRASP Listen Port for this purpose.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="discmech" title="Discovery Mechanism and Procedures">
<section title="Separated discovery and negotiation mechanisms">
<t>Although discovery and negotiation or synchronization are defined
together in GRASP, they are separate mechanisms. The discovery
process could run independently from the negotiation or synchronization
process. Upon receiving a Discovery (<xref target="DiscoveryMessage"/>)
<!-- or request (<xref target="RequestMessage"/>)--> message, the
recipient node should return a response message in which it either
indicates itself as a discovery responder or diverts the
initiator towards another more suitable ASA.</t>
<t>The discovery action will normally be followed by
a negotiation or synchronization action. The
discovery results could be utilized by the negotiation
protocol to decide which ASA the initiator will negotiate
with.</t>
<t>The initiator of a discovery action for a given objective need not
be capable of responding to that objective as a Negotiation Counterpart, as a
Synchronization Responder or as source for flooding. For example, an ASA might perform
discovery even if it only wishes to act a Synchronization Initiator or Negotiation Initiator.
Such an ASA does not itself need to respond to discovery messages.</t>
<t>It is also entirely possible to use GRASP discovery without any subsequent
negotiation or synchronization action. In this case, the discovered objective
is simply used as a name during the discovery process and any subsequent
operations between the peers are outside the scope of GRASP.</t>
</section>
<section title="Discovery Overview">
<t>A complete discovery process will start with a multicast on the
local link. On-link neighbors supporting the discovery objective will
respond directly. A neighbor with multiple interfaces will respond
with a cached discovery response if any. If not, it will relay the
discovery on its other interfaces, for example reaching a higher-level gateway
in a hierarchical network. If a node receiving the relayed discovery
supports the discovery objective, it will respond to the relayed discovery.
If it has a cached response, it will respond with that.
If not, it will repeat the discovery process, which thereby becomes recursive.
The loop count and timeout will ensure that the process ends.
</t>
<t>Exceptionally, a Discovery message MAY be sent unicast to a peer node,
which will then proceed exactly as if the message had been multicast. However,
this mode does not guarantee successful discovery in the general case.
</t>
</section>
<section title="Discovery Procedures">
<t>Discovery starts as an on-link operation. The Divert option
can tell the discovery initiator to contact an off-link
ASA for that discovery objective. Every Discovery message is sent
by a discovery initiator via UDP to the ALL_GRASP_NEIGHBOR link-local
multicast address (<xref target="Constants"/>). Every network
device that supports GRASP always listens to a well-known
UDP port to capture the discovery messages. Because this port
is unique in a device, this is a function of the GRASP kernel
and not of an individual ASA. As a result, each ASA will need to
register the objectives that it supports with the GRASP kernel.</t>
<t>If an ASA in a neighbor device supports the requested discovery objective,
the device SHOULD respond to the link-local multicast with a unicast Discovery Response
message (<xref target="ResponseMessage"/>) with locator option(s), unless it is
temporarily unavailable. Otherwise, if the neighbor has cached information
about an ASA that supports the requested discovery objective (usually
because it discovered the same objective before), it SHOULD
respond with a Discovery Response message with a Divert option pointing
to the appropriate Discovery Responder.</t>
<t>If a device has no information about the requested discovery objective,
and is not acting as a discovery relay (see below) it MUST silently
discard the Discovery message.</t>
<t>If no discovery response is received within a reasonable timeout
(default GRASP_DEF_TIMEOUT milliseconds, <xref target="Constants"/>),
the Discovery message MAY be repeated, with a newly generated
Session ID (<xref target="SessionID"/>). An exponential backoff SHOULD be used
for subsequent repetitions, to limit the load during busy periods.
Frequent repetition might be symptomatic of a denial of service attack.</t>
<t>After a GRASP device successfully discovers a locator for a Discovery Responder
supporting a specific objective, it MUST cache this information, including the interface
identifier via which it was discovered. This cache record MAY be used for future
negotiation or synchronization, and the locator SHOULD be passed on when appropriate
as a Divert option to another Discovery Initiator.</t>
<t>The cache mechanism MUST include a lifetime for each entry. The
lifetime is derived from a time-to-live (ttl) parameter in each
Discovery Response message.
Cached entries MUST be ignored or deleted after their lifetime expires.
In some environments, unplanned address renumbering might occur.
In such cases, the lifetime SHOULD be short compared to
the typical address lifetime and a mechanism to flush the
discovery cache SHOULD be implemented. The discovery mechanism
needs to track the node's current address to ensure that Discovery
Responses always indicate the correct address.</t>
<t>If multiple Discovery Responders are found for the same objective, they
SHOULD all be cached, unless this creates a resource shortage. The method
of choosing between multiple responders is an implementation choice.
This choice MUST be available to each ASA but the GRASP implementation
SHOULD provide a default choice.</t>
<t>Because Discovery Responders will be cached in a finite cache, they might
be deleted at any time. In this case, discovery will need to be repeated. If an
ASA exits for any reason, its locator might still be cached for some time,
and attempts to connect to it will fail. ASAs need to be robust in these
circumstances. </t>
</section>
<section title="Discovery Relaying">
<t>A GRASP instance with multiple link-layer interfaces (typically running in a router) MUST
support discovery on all interfaces. We refer to this as a 'relaying instance'.</t>
<t>However, different interfaces can be at different security levels: each group
of interfaces with the same security level SHOULD be serviced by the same GRASP process,
except for Limited Security Instances <xref target="secinst"/> which are
always single-interface instances and MUST NOT perform discovery relaying.</t>
<t>If a relaying instance receives a Discovery message
on a given interface for a specific objective that it does not support and for
which it has not previously cached a Discovery Responder, it MUST relay
the query by re-issuing a Discovery message as a link-local multicast on its other
interfaces.</t>
<t> The relayed discovery message MUST have the same Session ID as the incoming
discovery message and MUST be tagged with the IP address of its original initiator
(see <xref target="DiscoveryMessage"/>).
Since the relay device is unaware of the timeout set by the original
initiator it SHOULD set a timeout at least equal to GRASP_DEF_TIMEOUT milliseconds.</t>
<t>The relaying instance MUST decrement the loop count within the objective, and
MUST NOT relay the Discovery message if the result is zero.
Also, it MUST limit the total rate at which it relays discovery messages
to a reasonable value, in order to mitigate possible denial of service attacks.
It MUST cache the Session ID value and initiator address of each relayed
Discovery message until any Discovery Responses have arrived or
the discovery process has timed out.
To prevent loops, it MUST NOT relay a Discovery message
which carries a given cached Session ID and initiator address more than once.
These precautions avoid discovery loops and mitigate potential overload.</t>
<t>The discovery results received by the relaying instance MUST in turn be
sent as a Discovery Response message to the Discovery message that caused
the relay action.</t>
<t>This relayed discovery mechanism, with caching of the results,
should be sufficient to support most network bootstrapping scenarios.</t>
</section>
<section title="Rapid Mode (Discovery/Negotiation binding)">
<t>A Discovery message MAY include a Negotiation
Objective option. This allows a rapid mode of negotiation
described in <xref target="negproc"/>. A similar mechanism
is defined for synchronization in <xref target="synchproc"/>.</t>
<t>Note that rapid mode is currently limited to a single objective
for simplicity of design and implementation. A possible future extension
is to allow multiple objectives in rapid mode for greater efficiency.</t>
</section>
</section>
<section anchor="negproc" title="Negotiation Procedures">
<t>A negotiation initiator sends a negotiation request to a
counterpart ASA, including a specific negotiation objective.
It may request the negotiation
counterpart to make a specific configuration. Alternatively, it may
request a certain simulation or forecast result by sending a dry run configuration.
The details, including the distinction between dry run and an actual
configuration change, will be defined separately for each type of negotiation
objective.</t>
<t>If no reply message of any kind is received within a reasonable timeout
(default GRASP_DEF_TIMEOUT milliseconds, <xref target="Constants"/>),
the negotiation request MAY be repeated, with a newly generated
Session ID (<xref target="SessionID"/>). An exponential backoff SHOULD be used
for subsequent repetitions.</t>
<t>If the counterpart can immediately apply the requested
configuration, it will give an immediate positive (accept) answer.
This will end the negotiation phase immediately. Otherwise, it will
negotiate. It will reply with a proposed alternative configuration
that it can apply (typically, a configuration that uses fewer resources
than requested by the negotiation initiator). This will start a
bi-directional negotiation to reach a compromise between the two ASAs.</t>
<t>The negotiation procedure is ended when one of the negotiation
peers sends a Negotiation Ending message, which contains an accept
or decline option and does not need a response from the negotiation
peer. Negotiation may also end in failure (equivalent to a decline)
if a timeout is exceeded or a loop count is exceeded. </t>
<t>A negotiation procedure concerns one objective and one
counterpart. Both the initiator and the counterpart may take part in
simultaneous negotiations with various other ASAs, or in
simultaneous negotiations about different objectives. Thus, GRASP is
expected to be used in a multi-threaded mode. Certain negotiation
objectives may have restrictions on multi-threading, for example to
avoid over-allocating resources. </t>
<t>Some configuration actions, for example wavelength switching
in optical networks, might take considerable time to execute. The ASA
concerned needs to allow for this by design, but GRASP does allow for
a peer to insert latency in a negotiation process if necessary
(<xref target="ConfirmWaitingMessage"/>).</t>
<section anchor="rapidneg" title="Rapid Mode (Discovery/Negotiation Linkage)">
<t>A Discovery message MAY include a Negotiation
Objective option. In this case the Discovery message also acts
as a Request Negotiation message to indicate to the Discovery Responder
that it could directly reply to the Discovery Initiator with
a Negotiation message for rapid processing, if it
could act as the corresponding negotiation
counterpart. However, the indication is only advisory not
prescriptive. </t>
<t>It is possible that a Discovery Response will arrive from a responder that
does not support rapid mode, before such a Negotiation message arrives.
In this case, rapid mode will not occur.</t>
<t>This rapid mode could reduce the interactions between
nodes so that a higher efficiency could be achieved. However, a network in which some
nodes support rapid mode and others do not will have complex timing-dependent behaviors.
Therefore, the rapid negotiation function SHOULD be configured off by default
and MAY be configured on or off by Intent.</t>
</section>
</section>
<section anchor="synchproc" title="Synchronization and Flooding Procedure">
<t>A synchronization initiator sends a synchronization request to a
counterpart, including a specific synchronization objective.
The counterpart responds with a Synchronization message (<xref target="SynchMessage"/>)
containing the current value of the requested synchronization
objective. No further messages are needed. </t>
<t>If no reply message of any kind is received within a reasonable timeout
(default GRASP_DEF_TIMEOUT milliseconds, <xref target="Constants"/>),
the synchronization request MAY be repeated, with a newly generated
Session ID (<xref target="SessionID"/>). An exponential backoff SHOULD be used
for subsequent repetitions.</t>
<section anchor="flooding" title="Flooding">
<t>In the case just described, the message exchange is unicast and
concerns only one synchronization objective. For large groups of nodes
requiring the same data, synchronization flooding is available. For this,
a flooding initiator MAY send an unsolicited Flood Synchronization message containing
one or more Synchronization Objective option(s), if and only if the specification
of those objectives permits it. This is sent as a multicast message to the
ALL_GRASP_NEIGHBOR multicast address (<xref target="Constants"/>).</t>
<t>Every network device that supports GRASP always listens to a well-known
UDP port to capture flooding messages. Because this port is unique in a device,
this is a function of the GRASP kernel.</t>
<t>To ensure that flooding does not result in a loop, the originator of the Flood Synchronization message
MUST set the loop count in the objectives to a suitable value (the default is GRASP_DEF_LOOPCT).
Also, a suitable mechanism is needed
to avoid excessive multicast traffic. This mechanism MUST be defined as part of the
specification of the synchronization objective(s) concerned. It might be a simple rate
limit or a more complex mechanism such as the Trickle algorithm <xref target="RFC6206"/>.</t>
<t>A GRASP device with multiple link-layer interfaces (typically a router) MUST
support synchronization flooding on all interfaces. If it receives a multicast
Flood Synchronization message on a given interface, it MUST relay
it by re-issuing a Flood Synchronization message on its other interfaces.
The relayed message MUST have the same Session ID as the incoming
message and MUST be tagged with the IP address of its original initiator. </t>
<t>The relaying device MUST decrement the loop count within the first objective, and
MUST NOT relay the Flood Synchronization message if the result is zero.
Also, it MUST limit the total rate at which it relays Flood Synchronization messages
to a reasonable value, in order to mitigate possible denial of service attacks.
It MUST cache the Session ID value and initiator address of each relayed
Flood Synchronization message for a finite time not less than twice GRASP_DEF_TIMEOUT milliseconds.
To prevent loops, it MUST NOT relay a Flood Synchronization message
which carries a given cached Session ID and initiator address more than once.
These precautions avoid synchronization loops and mitigate potential overload.</t>
<t>Note that this mechanism is unreliable in the case of sleeping nodes,
or new nodes that join the network, or nodes that rejoin the network
after a fault. An ASA that initiates a flood SHOULD repeat the flood
at a suitable frequency and SHOULD also act as a synchronization responder for
the objective(s) concerned. Thus nodes that require an objective subject to
flooding can either wait for the next flood or request unicast synchronization
for that objective. </t>
<t>The multicast messages for synchronization flooding are subject to the security
rules in <xref target="reqsec"/>. In practice this means that they MUST NOT be transmitted
and MUST be ignored on receipt unless there is an operational ACP or equivalent strong
security in place. However, because
of the security weakness of link-local multicast (<xref target="security"/>),
synchronization objectives that are flooded SHOULD NOT contain unencrypted private
information and SHOULD be validated by the recipient ASA.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="rapidsynch" title="Rapid Mode (Discovery/Synchronization Linkage)">
<t>A Discovery message MAY include a Synchronization
Objective option. In this case the Discovery message also acts
as a Request Synchronization message to indicate to the Discovery Responder
that it could directly reply to the Discovery Initiator with
a Synchronization message <xref target="SynchMessage"/> with synchronization data for rapid processing,
if the discovery target supports the corresponding synchronization
objective. However, the indication is only advisory not
prescriptive.</t>
<t>It is possible that a Discovery Response will arrive from a responder that
does not support rapid mode, before such a Synchronization message arrives.
In this case, rapid mode will not occur.</t>
<t>This rapid mode could reduce the interactions between
nodes so that a higher efficiency could be achieved. However, a network in which some
nodes support rapid mode and others do not will have complex timing-dependent behaviors.
Therefore, the rapid synchronization function SHOULD be configured off by default
and MAY be configured on or off by Intent.</t>
</section>
</section>
</section>
<section anchor="Constants" title="GRASP Constants">
<t><list style="symbols">
<t>ALL_GRASP_NEIGHBOR<vspace blankLines="1"/>A link-local
scope multicast address used by a GRASP-enabled device to discover
GRASP-enabled neighbor (i.e., on-link) devices . All devices that
support GRASP are members of this multicast group.<list style="symbols">
<t>IPv6 multicast address: TBD1</t>
<t>IPv4 multicast address: TBD2</t>
</list></t>
<t>GRASP_LISTEN_PORT (TBD3)<vspace blankLines="1"/>A well-known UDP user port that
every GRASP-enabled network device MUST always listen to for link-local multicasts.
Additionally, this user port MAY be used to listen for TCP or UDP unicast messages
in a simple implementation of GRASP (<xref target="trans"/>).</t>
<t>GRASP_DEF_TIMEOUT (60000 milliseconds)<vspace blankLines="1"/>The default timeout used to
determine that a discovery etc. has failed to complete.</t>
<t>GRASP_DEF_LOOPCT (6)<vspace blankLines="1"/>The default loop count used to
determine that a negotiation has failed to complete, and to avoid looping messages.</t>
<t>GRASP_DEF_MAX_SIZE (2048)<vspace blankLines="1"/>The default maximum message size in bytes.</t>
</list></t>
</section>
<section anchor="SessionID" title="Session Identifier (Session ID)">
<t>This is an up to 32-bit opaque value used to distinguish multiple sessions between
the same two devices. A new Session ID MUST be generated by the initiator for every
new Discovery, Flood Synchronization or Request message. All responses and follow-up messages in the same
discovery, synchronization or negotiation procedure MUST carry the same Session ID.</t>
<t>The Session ID SHOULD have a very low collision rate locally. It
MUST be generated by a pseudo-random algorithm using a locally generated seed
which is unlikely to be used by any other device in the same
network <xref target="RFC4086"/>. When allocating a new Session ID, GRASP MUST
check that the value is not already in use and SHOULD check that it has not been
used recently, by consulting a cache of current and recent sessions. In the unlikely
event of a clash, GRASP MUST generate a new value.</t>
<t>However, there is a finite probability that two nodes might generate the same
Session ID value. For that reason, when a Session ID is communicated via GRASP, the
receiving node MUST tag it with the initiator's IP address to allow disambiguation.
In the highly unlikely event of two peers opening sessions with the same
Session ID value, this tag will allow the two sessions to be distinguished.
Multicast GRASP messages and their responses, which may be relayed between links,
therefore include a field that carries the initiator's global IP address.</t>
<t>There is a highly unlikely race condition in which two peers start simultaneous negotiation
sessions with each other using the same Session ID value. Depending on various
implementation choices, this might lead to the two sessions being confused.
See <xref target="RequestMessage"/> for details of how to avoid this.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="GRASPMessages" title="GRASP Messages">
<section title="Message Overview">
<t>This section defines the GRASP message format and message types.
Message types not listed here are reserved for future use. </t>
<t>The messages currently defined are:
<list style="bullets">
<t>Discovery and Discovery Response.</t>
<t>Request Negotiation, Negotiation, Confirm Waiting and Negotiation End.</t>
<t>Request Synchronization, Synchronization, and Flood Synchronization.</t>
<t>No Operation.</t>
</list></t>
</section>
<section title="GRASP Message Format">
<t>GRASP messages share an identical header format and a
variable format area for options. GRASP message headers and options
are transmitted in Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR)
<xref target="RFC7049"/>. In this specification, they are described
using CBOR data definition language (CDDL)
<xref target="I-D.greevenbosch-appsawg-cbor-cddl"/>.
Fragmentary CDDL is used to describe each item in this section. A complete and normative
CDDL specification of GRASP is given in <xref target="cddl"/>, including constants such
as message types.
</t>
<t>Every GRASP message, except the No Operation message, carries a Session ID (<xref target="SessionID"/>).
Options are then presented serially in the options field.</t>
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, every GRASP message follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
grasp-message = (message .within message-structure) / noop-message
message-structure = [MESSAGE_TYPE, session-id, ?initiator,
*grasp-option]
MESSAGE_TYPE = 1..255
session-id = 0..4294967295 ;up to 32 bits
grasp-option = any
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The MESSAGE_TYPE indicates the type of the message and thus defines
the expected options. Any options received that are not consistent with
the MESSAGE_TYPE SHOULD be silently discarded. </t>
<t>The No Operation (noop) message is described in <xref target="noop"/>.</t>
<t>The various MESSAGE_TYPE values are defined in <xref target="cddl"/>.</t>
<t>All other message elements are described below and formally defined in <xref target="cddl"/>.</t>
</section>
<section title="Message Size">
<t>GRASP nodes MUST be able to receive messages of at least GRASP_DEF_MAX_SIZE bytes. GRASP nodes
MUST NOT send messages longer than GRASP_DEF_MAX_SIZE bytes unless a longer size is explicitly
allowed for the objective concerned. For example, GRASP negotiation itself could be used
to agree on a longer message size.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="DiscoveryMessage" title="Discovery Message">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, a Discovery message follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
discovery-message = [M_DISCOVERY, session-id, initiator, objective]
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>
A discovery initiator sends a Discovery message
to initiate a discovery process for a particular objective option.
</t><t>
The discovery initiator sends all Discovery
messages via UDP to port GRASP_LISTEN_PORT at the link-local
ALL_GRASP_NEIGHBOR multicast address on each link-layer interface in use by GRASP.
It then listens for unicast TCP responses on a given port, and stores the discovery
results (including responding discovery objectives and
corresponding unicast locators).
</t>
<t>The listening port used for TCP MUST be the same port as used for sending the
Discovery UDP multicast, on a given interface. In a low-end implementation this MAY
be GRASP_LISTEN_PORT. In a more complex implementation, the GRASP discovery mechanism
will find, for each interface, a dynamic port that it can bind to for both UDP and TCP
before initiating any discovery.</t>
<t>
The 'initiator' field in the message is a globally unique IP address of the
initiator, for the sole purpose of disambiguating the Session ID
in other nodes. If for some reason the initiator does not
have a globally unique IP address, it MUST use a link-local
address for this purpose that is highly likely to be
unique, for example using <xref target="RFC7217"/>.
</t><t>
A Discovery message MUST include exactly one of the following:
<list style="symbols">
<t>a discovery objective option (<xref target="ObjOption"/>).
Its loop count MUST be set to a suitable value to prevent discovery
loops (default value is GRASP_DEF_LOOPCT). If the discovery initiator
requires only on-link responses, the loop count MUST be set to 1.
</t>
<t>a negotiation objective option (<xref target="ObjOption"/>). This
is used both for the purpose of discovery and to indicate
to the discovery target that it MAY directly reply to
the discovery initiatior with a Negotiation message for
rapid processing, if it could act as the corresponding negotiation counterpart.
The sender of such a Discovery message MUST initialize
a negotiation timer and loop count in the same way as a Request Negotiation message
(<xref target="RequestMessage"/>).
</t>
<t>a synchronization objective option (<xref target="ObjOption"/>).
This is used both for the purpose of discovery and to indicate to the discovery
target that it MAY directly reply to the discovery initiator with a Synchronization message
for rapid processing, if it could act as the corresponding synchronization counterpart.
Its loop count MUST be set to a suitable value to prevent discovery
loops (default value is GRASP_DEF_LOOPCT).</t>
</list></t>
<t>Exceptionally, a Discovery message MAY be sent unicast to a peer node,
which will then proceed exactly as if the message had been multicast.
</t>
</section>
<section anchor="ResponseMessage" title="Discovery Response Message">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, a Discovery Response message follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
response-message = [M_RESPONSE, session-id, initiator, ttl,
(+locator-option // divert-option), ?objective)]
ttl = 0..4294967295 ; in milliseconds
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>
A node which receives a Discovery message SHOULD send a
Discovery Response message if and only if it can respond to the discovery.
<list>
<t>It MUST contain the same Session ID and initiator as the Discovery message.
</t><t>It MUST contain a time-to-live (ttl) for the validity of the response, given
as a positive integer value in milliseconds. Zero is treated
as the default value GRASP_DEF_TIMEOUT (<xref target="Constants"/>).
</t><t>It MAY include a copy of the discovery objective from
the Discovery message.</t>
</list>
It is sent to the sender of the Discovery message via TCP
at the port used to send the Discovery message (as explained in <xref target="DiscoveryMessage"/>).
</t><t>
If the responding node supports the discovery objective
of the discovery, it MUST include at least one kind of
locator option (<xref target="LocatorOption"/>) to indicate its own
location. A sequence of multiple kinds of locator
options (e.g. IP address option and FQDN option) is also
valid.
</t><t>
If the responding node itself does not support the discovery
objective, but it knows the locator of the discovery
objective, then it SHOULD respond to the discovery message with a
divert option (<xref target="DivertOption"/>) embedding a locator
option or a combination of multiple kinds of locator
options which indicate the locator(s) of the discovery objective.
</t>
<t>More details on the processing of Discovery Responses are given in
<xref target="discmech"/>.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="RequestMessage" title="Request Messages">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, Request Negotiation and Request Synchronization messages follow the patterns:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
request-negotiation-message = [M_REQ_NEG, session-id, objective]
request-synchronization-message = [M_REQ_SYN, session-id, objective]
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>
A negotiation or synchronization requesting node
sends the appropriate Request message to the unicast address (directly
stored or resolved from an FQDN or URI) of the negotiation or
synchronization counterpart, using the appropriate protocol and port numbers
(selected from the discovery results).</t>
<t>A Request message MUST include the relevant objective option. In the case of
Request Negotiation, the objective option MUST include the requested value. </t>
<t>When an initiator sends a Request Negotiation message, it MUST initialize a negotiation timer
for the new negotiation thread. The default is GRASP_DEF_TIMEOUT milliseconds. Unless this
timeout is modified by a Confirm Waiting message (<xref target="ConfirmWaitingMessage"/>),
the initiator will consider that the negotiation has failed when the timer expires. </t>
<t>Similarly, when an initiator sends a Request Synchronization, it SHOULD initialize
a synchronization timer. The default is GRASP_DEF_TIMEOUT milliseconds.
The initiator will consider that synchronization has failed
if there is no response before the timer expires.</t>
<t>When an initiator sends a Request message, it MUST initialize the loop count
of the objective option with a value defined in the specification of the option
or, if no such value is specified, with GRASP_DEF_LOOPCT. </t>
<t>If a node receives a Request message for an objective for which no ASA is currently
listening, it MUST immediately close the relevant socket to indicate this to the initiator.</t>
<t>To avoid the highly unlikely race condition in which two nodes simultaneously request
sessions with each other using the same Session ID (<xref target="SessionID"/>), when a node receives a Request message,
it MUST verify that the received Session ID is not already locally active. In case of a clash,
it MUST discard the Request message, in which case the initiator will detect a timeout.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="NegotiationMessage" title="Negotiation Message">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, a Negotiation message follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
negotiate-message = [M_NEGOTIATE, session-id, objective]
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>A negotiation counterpart sends a Negotiation
message in response to a Request Negotiation message, a
Negotiation message, or a Discovery message
in Rapid Mode. A negotiation process MAY
include multiple steps.</t>
<t>The Negotiation message MUST include the relevant Negotiation Objective option,
with its value updated according to progress in the negotiation. The sender
MUST decrement the loop count by 1. If the loop count becomes zero the message
MUST NOT be sent. In this case the negotiation session has failed and will time out.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="NegotiationEndingMessage" title="Negotiation End Message">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, a Negotiation End message follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
end-message = [M_END, session-id, accept-option / decline-option]
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>
A negotiation counterpart sends an Negotiation End
message to close the negotiation. It MUST contain
either an accept or a decline option,
defined in <xref target="AcceptOption"/> and <xref target="DeclineOption"/>.
It could be sent either by the
requesting node or the responding node.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="ConfirmWaitingMessage" title="Confirm Waiting Message">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, a Confirm Waiting message follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
wait-message = [M_WAIT, session-id, waiting-time]
waiting-time = 0..4294967295 ; in milliseconds
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>
A responding node sends a Confirm Waiting message to
ask the requesting node to wait for a further
negotiation response. It might be that the local
process needs more time or that the negotiation
depends on another triggered negotiation. This
message MUST NOT include any other options.
When received, the waiting time value overwrites
and restarts the current negotiation timer
(<xref target="RequestMessage"/>).</t>
<t>The responding node SHOULD send a Negotiation, Negotiation End or another
Confirm Waiting message before the negotiation timer expires. If
not, the initiator MUST abandon or restart the negotiation
procedure, to avoid an indefinite wait.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="SynchMessage" title="Synchronization Message">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, a Synchronization message follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
synch-message = [M_SYNCH, session-id, objective]
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>A node which receives a Request Synchronization, or
a Discovery message in Rapid Mode, sends back a unicast Synchronization
message with the synchronization data, in the form of a GRASP Option for the specific
synchronization objective present in the Request Synchronization.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="FloodMessage" title="Flood Synchronization Message">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, a Flood Synchronization message follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
flood-message = [M_FLOOD, session-id, initiator, ttl,
(locator-option / []), +objective]
ttl = 0..4294967295 ; in milliseconds
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>
A node MAY initiate flooding by sending an unsolicited Flood Synchronization Message
with synchronization data. This MAY be sent to the
link-local ALL_GRASP_NEIGHBOR multicast address, in accordance
with the rules in <xref target="synchproc"/>.
<list><t>
The initiator address is provided as described for Discovery messages.
</t><t>
The message MUST contain a time-to-live (ttl) for the validity of the response, given
as a positive integer value in milliseconds. There is no default;
zero indicates an indefinite lifetime.
</t><t>
The message MAY contain a locator option indicating the ASA that initiated
the flooded data. In its absence, an empty option MUST be included.
</t><t>
The synchronization data are in the form of GRASP Option(s) for specific
synchronization objective(s). The loop count(s) MUST be set to a suitable
value to prevent flood loops (default value is GRASP_DEF_LOOPCT).</t>
</list>
A node that receives a Flood Synchronization message MUST cache the received objectives for
use by local ASAs. Each cached objective MUST be tagged with the locator option sent with it, or with a null
tag if an empty locator option was sent. If a subsequent Flood Synchronization message carrying the same objective
arrives with the same tag, the corresponding cached copy of the objective MUST be overwritten.
If a subsequent Flood Synchronization message carrying the same objective arrives with a different
tag, a new cached entry MUST be created.</t>
<t>Note: the purpose of this mechanism is to allow the recipient of flooded values to distinguish between
different senders of the same objective, and if necessary communicate with them using the locator, protocol
and port included in the locator option. Many objectives will not need this mechanism, so they will be flooded
with a null locator.</t>
<t>Cached entries MUST be ignored or deleted after their lifetime expires.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="invalid" title="Invalid Message">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, an Invalid message follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
invalid-message = [M_INVALID, session-id, ?any]
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>
This message MAY be sent by an implementation in response to an incoming message that it considers
invalid. The session-id MUST be copied from the incoming message. The content SHOULD
be diagnostic information such as a partial copy of the invalid message. An M_INVALID message
MAY be silently ignored by a recipient. However, it could be used in support of
extensibility, since it indicates that the remote node does not support a new or
obsolete message or option</t>
<t>An M_INVALID message MUST NOT be sent in response to an M_INVALID message.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="noop" title="No Operation Message">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, a No Operation message follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
noop-message = [M_NOOP]
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>
This message MAY be sent by an implementation that for practical reasons needs to
activate a socket. It MUST be silently ignored by a recipient.</t>
</section>
</section>
<section anchor="GRASPOptions" title="GRASP Options">
<t>This section defines the GRASP options for the negotiation
and synchronization protocol signaling. Additional
options may be defined in the future.</t>
<section title="Format of GRASP Options">
<t>GRASP options are CBOR objects that MUST start with an unsigned integer identifying
the specific option type carried in this option. These option types are formally
defined in <xref target="cddl"/>. Apart from that the only format requirement
is that each option MUST be a well-formed CBOR object. In general a CBOR array format
is RECOMMENDED to limit overhead.</t>
<t>GRASP options are usually scoped by using encapsulation. However, this is not a
requirement</t>
</section>
<section anchor="DivertOption" title="Divert Option">
<t>The Divert option is used to redirect a GRASP request to another
node, which may be more appropriate for the intended negotiation or synchronization. It
may redirect to an entity that is known as a specific negotiation or synchronization
counterpart (on-link or off-link) or a default gateway. The divert
option MUST only be encapsulated in Discovery Response messages.
If found elsewhere, it SHOULD be silently ignored.</t>
<t>A discovery initiator MAY ignore a Divert option if it only requires direct
discovery responses. </t>
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, the Divert option follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
divert-option = [O_DIVERT, +locator-option]
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The embedded Locator Option(s) (<xref target="LocatorOption"/>)
point to diverted destination target(s) in response to a Discovery message. </t>
</section>
<section anchor="AcceptOption" title="Accept Option">
<t>The accept option is used to indicate to the negotiation counterpart
that the proposed negotiation content is accepted.</t>
<t>The accept option MUST only be encapsulated in Negotiation End
messages. If found elsewhere, it SHOULD be silently ignored.</t>
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, the Accept option follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
accept-option = [O_ACCEPT]
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
</section>
<section anchor="DeclineOption" title="Decline Option">
<t>The decline option is used to indicate to the negotiation
counterpart the proposed negotiation content is declined and end the
negotiation process.</t>
<t>The decline option MUST only be encapsulated in
Negotiation End messages. If found elsewhere, it SHOULD be
silently ignored.</t>
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, the Decline option follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
decline-option = [O_DECLINE, ?reason]
reason = text ;optional error message
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>Note: there are scenarios where a negotiation counterpart wants
to decline the proposed negotiation content and continue the
negotiation process. For these scenarios, the negotiation
counterpart SHOULD use a Negotiate message, with either an objective
option that contains a data field set
to indicate a meaningless initial value, or a specific objective
option that provides further conditions for convergence.</t>
</section>
<!--<section anchor="IDOption" title="Device Identity Option">
<t>The Device Identity option carries the identities of the sender
and of the domain(s) that it belongs to. </t>
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, the Device Identity option follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
option-device-id = [O_DEVICE_ID, bytes]
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t> The option contains a variable-length field containing the device identity
and one or more domain identities. The format is not yet defined.
</t>
<t>Note: Currently this option is an unused placeholder. It might be removed or modified.</t>
</section> -->
<section anchor="LocatorOption" title="Locator Options">
<t>These locator options are used to present reachability information for an ASA,
a device or an interface. They are Locator IPv6 Address
Option, Locator IPv4 Address Option, Locator FQDN (Fully
Qualified Domain Name) Option and URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) Option.</t>
<t>Since ASAs will normally run as independent user programs, locator options need
to indicate the network layer locator plus the transport protocol and port number for
reaching the target. For this reason, the Locator Options for IP addresses
and FQDNs include this information explicitly. In the case of the URI Option,
this information can be encoded in the URI itself.</t>
<t>Note: It is assumed that all locators are in scope throughout
the GRASP domain. GRASP is not intended to work across disjoint addressing
or naming realms. </t>
<section title="Locator IPv6 address option">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, the IPv6 address option follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
ipv6-locator-option = [O_IPv6_LOCATOR, ipv6-address,
transport-proto, port-number]
ipv6-address = bytes .size 16
transport-proto = IPPROTO_TCP / IPPROTO_UDP
IPPROTO_TCP = 6
IPPROTO_UDP = 17
port-number = 0..65535
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The content of this option is a binary IPv6 address followed by the protocol number and port number to be used.</t>
<t>Note 1: The IPv6 address MUST normally have global scope. Exceptionally, during node bootstrap,
a link-local address MAY be used for specific objectives only.</t>
<t>Note 2: A link-local IPv6 address MUST NOT be used when
this option is included in a Divert option.</t>
</section>
<section title="Locator IPv4 address option">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, the IPv4 address option follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
ipv4-locator-option = [O_IPv4_LOCATOR, ipv4-address,
transport-proto, port-number]
ipv4-address = bytes .size 4
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The content of this option is a binary IPv4 address followed by the protocol number and port number to be used.</t>
<t>Note: If an operator has internal network address translation for IPv4,
this option MUST NOT be used within the Divert option.</t>
</section>
<section title="Locator FQDN option">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, the FQDN option follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
fqdn-locator-option = [O_FQDN_LOCATOR, text,
transport-proto, port-number]
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The content of this option is the Fully Qualified Domain Name of the target followed by the protocol number and port number to be used.
</t>
<t>Note 1: Any FQDN which might not be valid throughout the network in question,
such as a Multicast DNS name <xref target="RFC6762"/>, MUST NOT be used when
this option is used within the Divert option.</t>
<t>Note 2: Normal GRASP operations are not expected to use this option. It is intended for
special purposes such as discovering external services.</t>
</section>
<section title="Locator URI option">
<t>In fragmentary CDDL, the URI option follows the pattern:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
uri-locator = [O_URI_LOCATOR, text]
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The content of this option is the Uniform Resource Identifier of the target
<xref target="RFC3986"/>.
</t>
<t>Note 1: Any URI which might not be valid throughout the network in question,
such as one based on a Multicast DNS name <xref target="RFC6762"/>, MUST NOT be used when
this option is used within the Divert option.</t>
<t>Note 2: Normal GRASP operations are not expected to use this option. It is intended for
special purposes such as discovering external services.</t>
</section>
</section>
<!---->
</section>
<section title="Objective Options">
<section anchor="ObjOption" title="Format of Objective Options">
<t>An objective option is used to identify objectives for
the purposes of discovery, negotiation or synchronization.
All objectives MUST be in the following format,
described in fragmentary CDDL:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
objective = [objective-name, objective-flags, loop-count, ?any]
objective-name = text
loop-count = 0..255
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>All objectives are identified by a unique name which is a case-sensitive UTF-8 string. </t>
<t>The names of generic objectives MUST NOT include a colon (":")
and MUST be registered with IANA (<xref target="iana"/>).</t>
<t>The names of privately defined objectives MUST include at least one colon (":").
The string preceding the last colon in the name MUST be globally unique and in some
way identify the entity or person defining the objective. The following three methods
MAY be used to create such a globally unique string:
<list style="numbers">
<t>The unique string is a decimal number representing a registered 32 bit Private Enterprise
Number (PEN) <xref target="I-D.liang-iana-pen"/> that uniquely identifies the enterprise
defining the objective.</t>
<t>The unique string is a fully qualified domain name that uniquely identifies the entity or person
defining the objective.</t>
<t>The unique string is an email address that uniquely identifies the entity or person
defining the objective.</t>
</list>
The GRASP protocol treats the objective name as an opaque string. For example, "EX1", "411:EX1",
"example.com:EX1", "example.org:EX1 and "user@example.org:EX1" would be five different objectives.</t>
<t>The 'objective-flags' field is described below.</t>
<t>The 'loop-count' field is used for terminating negotiation as described in
<xref target="NegotiationMessage"/>. It is also used for terminating discovery as
described in <xref target="discmech"/>, and for terminating flooding as described in
<xref target="flooding"/>.
</t>
<t>
The 'any' field is to express the actual value of a negotiation
or synchronization objective. Its format is defined in the
specification of the objective and may be a single value
or a data structure of any kind. It is optional because it is optional
in a Discovery or Discovery Response message.</t>
</section>
<section title="Objective flags">
<t>An objective may be relevant for discovery only, for discovery and negotiation, or
for discovery and synchronization. This is expressed in the objective by logical flags:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
objective-flags = uint .bits objective-flag
objective-flag = &(
F_DISC: 0 ; valid for discovery only
F_NEG: 1 ; valid for discovery and negotiation
F_SYNCH: 2 ; valid for discovery and synchronization
)
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
</section>
<section anchor="ConsOption" title="General Considerations for Objective Options">
<t>As mentioned above, Objective Options MUST be assigned a unique name.
As long as privately defined Objective Options obey the rules above, this document
does not restrict their choice of name, but the entity or person concerned SHOULD publish the names in use. </t>
<t>All Objective Options MUST respect the CBOR patterns defined above as "objective"
and MUST replace the "any" field with a valid CBOR data definition
for the relevant use case and application. </t>
<t>An Objective Option that contains no additional
fields beyond its "loop-count" can only be a discovery objective and MUST only be used
in Discovery and Discovery Response messages.</t>
<t>The Negotiation Objective Options contain negotiation objectives,
which vary according to different functions/services. They MUST
be carried by Discovery, Request Negotiation or Negotiation messages only. The negotiation
initiator MUST set the initial "loop-count" to a value specified in the
specification of the objective or, if no such value is specified, to
GRASP_DEF_LOOPCT.</t>
<t>For most scenarios, there should be initial values in the
negotiation requests. Consequently, the Negotiation Objective options MUST
always be completely presented in a Request Negotiation message, or in a Discovery
message in rapid mode. If there is no
initial value, the bits in the value field SHOULD all be set to
indicate a meaningless value, unless this is inappropriate for the
specific negotiation objective.</t>
<t>Synchronization Objective Options are similar, but MUST be carried
by Discovery, Discovery Response, Request Synchronization, or Flood Synchronization
messages only. They include
value fields only in Synchronization or Flood Synchronization messages. </t>
</section>
<section title="Organizing of Objective Options">
<t>Generic objective options MUST be specified in documents
available to the public and SHOULD be designed to use either
the negotiation or the synchronization mechanism described above.
</t>
<t>As noted earlier, one negotiation objective is handled by each
GRASP negotiation thread. Therefore, a negotiation objective, which is
based on a specific function or action, SHOULD be organized as a single
GRASP option. It is NOT RECOMMENDED to organize multiple negotiation
objectives into a single option, nor to split a single function
or action into multiple negotiation objectives. </t>
<t>It is important to understand that GRASP negotiation does not
support transactional integrity. If transactional integrity is needed for
a specific objective, this must be ensured by the ASA. For example, an ASA
might need to ensure that it only participates in one negotiation thread
at the same time. Such an ASA would need to stop listening for incoming
negotiation requests before generating an outgoing negotiation request.</t>
<t>A synchronization objective SHOULD be organized as a single GRASP option.</t>
<t>Some objectives will support more than one operational mode.
An example is a negotiation objective with both a "dry run" mode
(where the negotiation is to find out whether the other end can in fact
make the requested change without problems) and a "live" mode. Such
modes will be defined in the specification of such an objective. These
objectives SHOULD include flags indicating the
applicable mode(s).</t>
<t>An objective may have multiple parameters. Parameters
can be categorized into two classes: the obligatory ones presented as
fixed fields; and the optional ones presented in CBOR sub-options or
some other form of data structure embedded in CBOR. The format might be
inherited from an existing management or configuration protocol,
the objective option acting as a carrier for that format.
The data structure might be defined in a formal language, but that is a
matter for the specifications of individual objectives.
There are many candidates, according to the context, such as ABNF, RBNF,
XML Schema, possibly YANG, etc. The GRASP protocol itself is agnostic on
these questions. </t>
<t>It is NOT RECOMMENDED to split parameters in a single objective into
multiple options, unless they have different response periods. An
exception scenario may also be described by split objectives.</t>
<!-- <t>If the value of an objective has time-sensitive properties such as a defined
lifetime, a defined expiry time, or a defined refresh rate, these SHOULD be
expressed as part of the definition of the objective itself; they are not
foreseen in the GRASP protocol. For example, an objective that is flooded
using Flood Synchronization might include a parameter specifying its
expiry time as a UTC string.</t> -->
<t>All objectives MUST support GRASP discovery. However, as mentioned
in <xref target="highlevel"/>, it is acceptable for an ASA to use an alternative method
of discovery. </t>
<t>Normally, a GRASP objective will refer to specific technical parameters
as explained in <xref target="terms"/>. However, it is acceptable to define
an abstract objective for the purpose of managing or coordinating ASAs.
It is also acceptable to define a special-purpose objective for purposes
such as trust bootstrapping or formation of the ACP.</t>
</section>
<section title="Experimental and Example Objective Options">
<t>The names "EX0" through "EX9" have been reserved for experimental options.
Multiple names have been assigned because a single experiment
may use multiple options simultaneously. These experimental options
are highly likely to have different meanings when used for different
experiments. Therefore, they SHOULD NOT be used without an explicit
human decision and SHOULD NOT be used in unmanaged networks such as
home networks.</t>
<t>These names are also RECOMMENDED for use in documentation
examples.</t>
</section>
</section>
</section>
<section title="Implementation Status [RFC Editor: please remove]">
<t>Two prototype implementations of GRASP have been made.</t>
<section title="BUPT C++ Implementation">
<t><list style="symbols">
<t>Name: BaseNegotiator.cpp, msg.cpp, Client.cpp, Server.cpp</t>
<t>Description: C++ implementation of GRASP kernel and API</t>
<t>Maturity: Prototype code, interoperable between Ubuntu.</t>
<t>Coverage: Corresponds to draft-carpenter-anima-gdn-protocol-03. Since it was implemented
based on the old version draft, the most significant limitations comparing to current protocol design
include:
<list style="symbols">
<t>Not support CBOR</t>
<t>Not support Flooding</t>
<t>Not support loop avoidance</t>
<t>only coded for IPv6, any IPv4 is accidental</t></list></t>
<t>Licensing: Huawei License.</t>
<t>Experience: https://github.com/liubingpang/IETF-Anima-Signaling-Protocol/blob/master/README.md</t>
<t>Contact: https://github.com/liubingpang/IETF-Anima-Signaling-Protocol</t>
</list></t>
</section>
<section title="Python Implementation">
<t><list style="symbols">
<t>Name: graspy</t>
<t>Description: Python 3 implementation of GRASP kernel and API.</t>
<t>Maturity: Prototype code, interoperable between Windows 7 and Linux.</t>
<t>Coverage: Corresponds to draft-ietf-anima-grasp-08. Limitations include:
<list style="symbols">
<t>insecure: uses a dummy ACP module and does not implement TLS</t>
<t>only coded for IPv6, any IPv4 is accidental</t>
<t>FQDN and URI locators incompletely supported</t>
<t>no code for rapid mode</t>
<t>relay code is lazy (no rate control)</t>
<t>all unicast transactions use TCP (no unicast UDP). Experimental code for unicast UDP proved to be complex and brittle.</t>
<t>optional Objective option in Response messages not implemented</t>
<t>workarounds for defects in Python socket module and Windows socket peculiarities</t>
</list></t>
<t>Licensing: Simplified BSD</t>
<t>Experience: https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/graspy/graspy.pdf</t>
<t>Contact: https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/graspy/</t>
</list></t>
</section>
</section>
<section anchor="security" title="Security Considerations">
<t>It is obvious that a successful attack on negotiation-enabled nodes
would be extremely harmful, as such nodes might end up with a completely
undesirable configuration that would also adversely affect their peers.
GRASP nodes and messages therefore require full protection. </t>
<t>- Authentication<list style="hanging">
<t>A cryptographically authenticated identity for each device is
needed in an autonomic network. It is not safe to assume that a
large network is physically secured against interference or that all
personnel are trustworthy. Each autonomic node MUST be capable
of proving its identity and authenticating its messages. GRASP
relies on a separate external certificate-based security mechanism to support
authentication, data integrity protection, and anti-replay protection.</t>
<t>Since GRASP is intended to be deployed in a single administrative
domain operating its own trust anchor and CA, there is
no need for a trusted public third party. In a network requiring
"air gap" security, such a dependency would be unacceptable. </t>
<t>If GRASP is used temporarily without an external security mechanism,
for example during system bootstrap (<xref target="reqsec"/>),
the Session ID (<xref target="SessionID"/>) will act as a nonce to
provide limited protection against third parties injecting responses.
A full analysis of the secure bootstrap process is out of scope for the
present document. </t>
</list></t>
<t>- Authorization and Roles<list style="hanging">
<t>The GRASP protocol is agnostic about the role of individual ASAs and about
which objectives a particular ASA is authorized to support. An implementation
might support precautions such as allowing only one ASA in a given node to modify
a given objective, but this may not be appropriate in all cases. For example,
it might be operationally useful to allow an old and a new version of the same
ASA to run simultaneously during an overlap period. These questions are out
of scope for the present specification.</t>
</list></t>
<t>- Privacy and confidentiality<list style="hanging">
<t>Generally speaking, no personal information is expected to be
involved in the signaling protocol, so there should be no direct
impact on personal privacy. Nevertheless, traffic flow paths, VPNs,
etc. could be negotiated, which could be of interest for traffic
analysis. Also, operators generally want to conceal details of their
network topology and traffic density from outsiders. Therefore,
since insider attacks cannot be excluded in a large
network, the security mechanism for the protocol MUST
provide message confidentiality. This is why <xref target="reqsec"/>
requires either an ACP or the use of TLS.</t>
</list></t>
<t>- Link-local multicast security<list style="hanging">
<t>GRASP has no reasonable alternative to using link-local multicast
for Discovery or Flood Synchronization messages and these messages are sent in clear and
with no authentication. They are therefore available to on-link eavesdroppers, and
could be forged by on-link attackers. In the case of Discovery, the Discovery Responses
are unicast and will therefore be protected (<xref target="reqsec"/>), and an untrusted
forger will not be able to receive responses. In the case of Flood Synchronization, an on-link
eavesdropper will be able to receive the flooded objectives but there is no response
message to consider. Some precautions for Flood Synchronization messages
are suggested in <xref target="flooding"/>.</t>
</list></t>
<t>- DoS Attack Protection<list style="hanging">
<t>GRASP discovery partly relies on insecure link-local multicast. Since
routers participating in GRASP sometimes relay discovery messages from one link
to another, this could be a vector for denial of service attacks. Some
mitigations are specified in <xref target="discmech"/>. However, malicious
code installed inside the Autonomic Control Plane could always launch
DoS attacks consisting of spurious discovery messages, or of spurious
discovery responses. Additionally,
it is of great importance that firewalls prevent any GRASP messages
from entering the domain from an untrusted source. </t>
</list></t>
<t>- Security during bootstrap and discovery<list style="hanging">
<t>A node cannot authenticate GRASP traffic from other nodes until it
has identified the trust anchor and can validate certificates for other
nodes. Also, until it has succesfully enrolled
<xref target="I-D.ietf-anima-bootstrapping-keyinfra"/> it cannot
assume that other nodes are able to authenticate its own traffic.
Therefore, GRASP discovery during the bootstrap phase for a new device
will inevitably be insecure and GRASP synchronization and negotiation
will be impossible until enrollment is complete. Further details
are given in <xref target="secinst"/>.</t>
</list></t>
<t>- Security of discovered locators<list style="hanging">
<t>When GRASP discovery returns an IP address, it MUST be that of a node
within the secure environment (<xref target="reqsec"/>). If it returns
an FQDN or a URI, the ASA that receives it MUST NOT assume that the
target of the locator is within the secure environment.</t>
</list></t>
</section>
<section anchor="cddl" title="CDDL Specification of GRASP">
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
<CODE BEGINS>
grasp-message = (message .within message-structure) / noop-message
message-structure = [MESSAGE_TYPE, session-id, ?initiator,
*grasp-option]
MESSAGE_TYPE = 0..255
session-id = 0..4294967295 ;up to 32 bits
grasp-option = any
message /= discovery-message
discovery-message = [M_DISCOVERY, session-id, initiator, objective]
message /= response-message ;response to Discovery
response-message = [M_RESPONSE, session-id, initiator, ttl,
(+locator-option // divert-option), ?objective]
message /= synch-message ;response to Synchronization request
synch-message = [M_SYNCH, session-id, objective]
message /= flood-message
flood-message = [M_FLOOD, session-id, initiator, ttl,
(locator-option / []), +objective]
message /= request-negotiation-message
request-negotiation-message = [M_REQ_NEG, session-id, objective]
message /= request-synchronization-message
request-synchronization-message = [M_REQ_SYN, session-id, objective]
message /= negotiation-message
negotiation-message = [M_NEGOTIATE, session-id, objective]
message /= end-message
end-message = [M_END, session-id, accept-option / decline-option ]
message /= wait-message
wait-message = [M_WAIT, session-id, waiting-time]
message /= invalid-message
invalid-message = [M_INVALID, session-id, ?any]
noop-message = [M_NOOP]
divert-option = [O_DIVERT, +locator-option]
accept-option = [O_ACCEPT]
decline-option = [O_DECLINE, ?reason]
reason = text ;optional error message
waiting-time = 0..4294967295 ; in milliseconds
ttl = 0..4294967295 ; in milliseconds
locator-option /= [O_IPv4_LOCATOR, ipv4-address,
transport-proto, port-number]
ipv4-address = bytes .size 4
locator-option /= [O_IPv6_LOCATOR, ipv6-address,
transport-proto, port-number]
ipv6-address = bytes .size 16
locator-option /= [O_FQDN_LOCATOR, text, transport-proto, port-number]
transport-proto = IPPROTO_TCP / IPPROTO_UDP
IPPROTO_TCP = 6
IPPROTO_UDP = 17
port-number = 0..65535
locator-option /= [O_URI_LOCATOR, text]
initiator = ipv4-address / ipv6-address
objective-flags = uint .bits objective-flag
objective-flag = &(
F_DISC: 0 ; valid for discovery only
F_NEG: 1 ; valid for discovery and negotiation
F_SYNCH: 2) ; valid for discovery and synchronization
objective = [objective-name, objective-flags, loop-count, ?any]
objective-name = text ;see specification for uniqueness rules
loop-count = 0..255
; Constants for message types and option types
M_NOOP = 0
M_DISCOVERY = 1
M_RESPONSE = 2
M_REQ_NEG = 3
M_REQ_SYN = 4
M_NEGOTIATE = 5
M_END = 6
M_WAIT = 7
M_SYNCH = 8
M_FLOOD = 9
M_INVALID = 99
O_DIVERT = 100
O_ACCEPT = 101
O_DECLINE = 102
O_IPv6_LOCATOR = 103
O_IPv4_LOCATOR = 104
O_FQDN_LOCATOR = 105
O_URI_LOCATOR = 106
<CODE ENDS>
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
</section>
<section anchor="iana" title="IANA Considerations">
<t>This document defines the Generic Autonomic Signaling Protocol (GRASP).</t>
<t><xref target="Constants"/> explains the following link-local multicast
addresses, which IANA is requested to assign for use by GRASP:</t>
<t><list style="hanging">
<t hangText="ALL_GRASP_NEIGHBOR multicast address">(IPv6): (TBD1).
Assigned in the IPv6 Link-Local Scope Multicast Addresses registry.</t>
<t hangText="ALL_GRASP_NEIGHBOR multicast address">(IPv4): (TBD2).
Assigned in the IPv4 Multicast Local Network Control Block.
<!-- <vspace blankLines="1"/>
(Note in draft: alternatively, we could use 224.0.0.1, currently
defined as All Systems on this Subnet.)--></t>
</list></t>
<t><xref target="Constants"/> explains the following User Port,
which IANA is requested to assign for use by GRASP for both UDP and TCP:</t>
<t>GRASP_LISTEN_PORT: (TBD3)
<vspace blankLines="0"/>
Service Name: Generic Autonomic Signaling Protocol (GRASP)
<vspace blankLines="0"/>
Transport Protocols: UDP, TCP
<vspace blankLines="0"/>
Assignee: iesg@ietf.org
<vspace blankLines="0"/>
Contact: chair@ietf.org
<vspace blankLines="0"/>
Description: See <xref target="Constants"/>
<vspace blankLines="0"/>
Reference: RFC XXXX (this document)</t>
<t>The IANA is requested to create a GRASP Parameter Registry
including two registry tables. These are the GRASP Messages and Options Table and
the GRASP Objective Names Table.</t>
<t>GRASP Messages and Options Table. The values in this table are names paired with decimal
integers. Future values MUST be assigned using the Standards Action policy
defined by <xref target="RFC5226"/>. The following initial values are assigned by this document:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[M_NOOP = 0
M_DISCOVERY = 1
M_RESPONSE = 2
M_REQ_NEG = 3
M_REQ_SYN = 4
M_NEGOTIATE = 5
M_END = 6
M_WAIT = 7
M_SYNCH = 8
M_FLOOD = 9
M_INVALID = 99
O_DIVERT = 100
O_ACCEPT = 101
O_DECLINE = 102
O_IPv6_LOCATOR = 103
O_IPv4_LOCATOR = 104
O_FQDN_LOCATOR = 105
O_URI_LOCATOR = 106
]]></artwork>
</figure>
</t>
<t>GRASP Objective Names Table. The values in this table are UTF-8 strings.
Future values MUST be assigned using the Specification Required policy
defined by <xref target="RFC5226"/>.
The following initial values are assigned by this document:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[ EX0
EX1
EX2
EX3
EX4
EX5
EX6
EX7
EX8
EX9
]]></artwork>
</figure>
</t>
</section>
<section anchor="ack" title="Acknowledgements">
<t>A major contribution to the original version of this document was made by Sheng Jiang.
Significant review inputs were received from Joel Halpern and Michael Richardson.</t>
<t>Valuable comments were received from
Michael Behringer,
Jeferson Campos Nobre,
Laurent Ciavaglia,
Zongpeng Du,
Toerless Eckert,
Yu Fu,
Zhenbin Li,
Dimitri Papadimitriou,
Pierre Peloso,
Reshad Rahman,
Markus Stenberg,
Rene Struik,
Dacheng Zhang,
and other participants in the NMRG research group
and the ANIMA working group.</t>
<!-- <t>This document was produced using the xml2rfc tool <xref target="RFC2629"/>.</t> -->
</section>
</middle>
<back>
<references title="Normative References">
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.2119'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.5280'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.4086'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.5246'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.6347'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.3986'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.7049'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.7217'?>
<?rfc include='reference.I-D.greevenbosch-appsawg-cbor-cddl'?>
</references>
<references title="Informative References">
<!-- <?rfc include='reference.RFC.2629'?> -->
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.2334'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.5226'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.6733'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.2865'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.4861'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.5971'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.6241'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.3209'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.2205'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.3416'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.3315'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.6887'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.6762'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.6763'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.2608'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.6206'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.7228'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.7575'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.7576'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.7558'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.7787'?>
<?rfc include='reference.RFC.7788'?>
<?rfc include='reference.I-D.liu-anima-grasp-api'?>
<?rfc include='reference.I-D.stenberg-anima-adncp'?>
<?rfc include='reference.I-D.ietf-netconf-restconf'?>
<?rfc include='reference.I-D.chaparadza-intarea-igcp'?>
<?rfc include='reference.I-D.ietf-anima-reference-model'?>
<?rfc include='reference.I-D.ietf-anima-bootstrapping-keyinfra'?>
<?rfc include='reference.I-D.ietf-anima-autonomic-control-plane'?>
<?rfc include='reference.I-D.ietf-anima-stable-connectivity'?>
<?rfc include='reference.I-D.liang-iana-pen'?>
</references>
<section title="Open Issues [RFC Editor: Please remove if empty]">
<t><list style="symbols">
<t>59. Placeholder.</t>
</list></t>
</section>
<section title="Closed Issues [RFC Editor: Please remove]">
<t>
<list style="symbols">
<t>1. UDP vs TCP: For now, this specification suggests UDP and TCP as
message transport mechanisms. This is not clarified yet. UDP
is good for short conversations, is necessary for multicast discovery,
and generally fits the discovery and divert scenarios
well. However, it will cause problems with large messages. TCP is good
for stable and long sessions, with a little bit of time
consumption during the session establishment stage. If messages
exceed a reasonable MTU, a TCP mode will be required in any case.
This question may be affected by the security discussion.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED by specifying UDP for short message and TCP for longer one.
</t>
<t>2. DTLS or TLS vs built-in security mechanism. For now, this
specification has chosen a PKI based built-in security mechanism
based on asymmetric cryptography. However, (D)TLS might be chosen as security solution
to avoid duplication of effort. It also allows essentially similar security for short
messages over UDP and longer ones over TCP. The implementation trade-offs are different.
The current approach requires expensive asymmetric cryptographic calculations
for every message. (D)TLS has startup overheads but cheaper crypto per message.
DTLS is less mature than TLS.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED by specifying external security (ACP or (D)TLS).
</t>
<t>The following open issues applied only if the original security model was retained:
<list style="symbols">
<t>2.1. For replay protection, GRASP currently requires every participant to have an
NTP-synchronized clock. Is this OK for low-end devices, and how does
it work during device bootstrapping?
We could take the Timestamp out of signature option, to become
an independent and OPTIONAL (or RECOMMENDED) option.</t>
<t>2.2. The Signature Option states that this option
could be any place in a message. Wouldn't it be better to specify a position
(such as the end)? That would be much simpler to implement. </t>
</list>RESOLVED by changing security model.</t>
<t>3. DoS Attack Protection needs work.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED by adding text.</t>
<t>4. Should we consider preferring a text-based approach to
discovery (after the initial discovery needed for bootstrapping)?
This could be a complementary mechanism for multicast based discovery, especially
for a very large autonomic network. Centralized registration could be automatically
deployed incrementally. At the very first stage, the repository could be empty;
then it could be filled in by the objectives discovered by different devices (for example
using Dynamic DNS Update). The more records are stored in the repository, the less the
multicast-based discovery is needed. However, if we adopt such a mechanism, there would be
challenges: stateful solution, and security.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED for now by adding optional use of DNS-SD by ASAs. Subsequently removed
by editors as irrelevant to GRASP istelf.
</t>
<t>5. Need to expand description of the minimum requirements for
the specification of an individual discovery, synchronization or
negotiation objective.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED for now by extra wording.</t>
<t>6. Use case and protocol walkthrough. A description of how a node starts up,
performs discovery, and conducts negotiation and synchronisation for a sample
use case would help readers to understand the applicability of this specification.
Maybe it should be an artificial use case or maybe a simple real one, based on
a conceptual API. However, the authors have not yet decided whether to have a
separate document or have it in the protocol document.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: recommend a separate document.</t>
<t>7. Cross-check against other ANIMA WG documents for consistency and gaps.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Satisfied by WGLC.</t>
<t>8. Consideration of ADNCP proposal.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED by adding optional use of DNCP for flooding-type synchronization.</t>
<t>9. Clarify how a GDNP instance knows whether it is running inside the ACP. (Sheng)
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED by improved text.</t>
<t>10. Clarify how a non-ACP GDNP instance initiates (D)TLS. (Sheng)
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED by improved text and declaring DTLS out of scope for this draft.
</t>
<t>11. Clarify how UDP/TCP choice is made. (Sheng) [Like DNS? - Brian]
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED by improved text.</t>
<t>12. Justify that IP address within ACP or (D)TLS environment is sufficient to
prove AN identity; or explain how Device Identity Option is used. (Sheng)
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED for now: we assume that all ASAs in a device are trusted
as soon as the device is trusted, so they share credentials. In that case
the Device Identity Option is useless. This needs to be reviewed later.</t>
<t>13. Emphasise that negotiation/synchronization are independent from discovery,
although the rapid discovery mode includes the first step of a negotiation/synchronization.
(Sheng)
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED by improved text. </t>
<t>14. Do we need an unsolicited flooding mechanism for discovery (for discovery results
that everyone needs), to reduce scaling impact of flooding discovery messages? (Toerless)
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Yes, added to requirements and solution. </t>
<t>15. Do we need flag bits in Objective Options to distinguish distinguish Synchronization
and Negotiation "Request" or rapid mode "Discovery" messages? (Bing)
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: yes, work on the API showed that these flags are essential. </t>
<t>16. (Related to issue 14). Should we revive the "unsolicited Response" for flooding
synchronisation data? This has to be done carefully due to the well-known issues with
flooding, but it could be useful, e.g. for Intent distribution, where DNCP doesn't
seem applicable.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Yes, see #14.
</t>
<t>17. Ensure that the discovery mechanism is completely proof against loops
and protected against duplicate responses.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Added loop count mechanism.
</t>
<t>18. Discuss the handling of multiple valid discovery responses.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Stated that the choice must be available to the ASA
but GRASP implementation should pick a default. </t>
<t>19. Should we use a text-oriented format such as JSON/CBOR instead of
native binary TLV format?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Yes, changed to CBOR. </t>
<t>20. Is the Divert option needed? If a discovery response provides a valid
IP address or FQDN, the recipient doesn't gain any extra knowledge from the Divert.
On the other hand, the presence of Divert informs the receiver that the target
is off-link, which might be useful sometimes.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Decided to keep Divert option. </t>
<t>21. Rename the protocol as GRASP (GeneRic Autonomic Signaling Protocol)?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Yes, name changed.</t>
<t>22. Does discovery mechanism scale robustly as needed? Need hop limit on relaying?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Added hop limit.</t>
<t>23. Need more details on TTL for caching discovery responses.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Done.</t>
<t>24. Do we need "fast withdrawal" of discovery responses?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: This doesn't seem necessary. If an ASA exits or stops supporting a given objective,
peers will fail to start future sessions and will simply repeat discovery. </t>
<t>25. Does GDNP discovery meet the needs of multi-hop DNS-SD?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Decided not to consider this further as a GRASP protocol issue. GRASP objectives
could embed DNS-SD formats if needed.</t>
<t>26. Add a URL type to the locator options (for security bootstrap etc.)
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Done, later renamed as URI. </t>
<t>27. Security of Flood multicasts (<xref target="flooding"/>).
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: added text.</t>
<t>28. Does ACP support secure link-local multicast?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED by new text in the Security Considerations.</t>
<t>29. PEN is used to distinguish vendor options. Would it be better to use
a domain name? Anything unique will do.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Simplified this by removing PEN field and changing naming rules
for objectives.</t>
<t>30. Does response to discovery require randomized delays to mitigate amplification attacks?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: WG feedback is that it's unnecessary.</t>
<t>31. We have specified repeats for failed discovery etc. Is that sufficient to deal with sleeping nodes?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: WG feedback is that it's unnecessary to say more.</t>
<t>32. We have one-to-one synchronization and flooding synchronization. Do we also need
selective flooding to a subset of nodes?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: This will be discussed as a protocol extension in a separate draft
(draft-liu-anima-grasp-distribution).</t>
<t>33. Clarify if/when discovery needs to be repeated.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Done.</t>
<t>34. Clarify what is mandatory for running in ACP, expand discussion of security boundary
when running with no ACP - might rely on the local PKI infrastructure.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Done.</t>
<t>35. State that role-based authorization of ASAs is out of scope for GRASP.
GRASP doesn't recognize/handle any "roles".
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Done.</t>
<t>36. Reconsider CBOR definition for PEN syntax.
( objective-name = text / [pen, text] ; pen = uint )
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: See issue 29.</t>
<t>37. Are URI locators really needed?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Yes, e.g. for security bootstrap discovery, but added note that
addresses are the normal case (same for FQDN locators).</t>
<t>38. Is Session ID sufficient to identify relayed responses?
Isn't the originator's address needed too?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Yes, this is needed for multicast messages and their responses.</t>
<t>39. Clarify that a node will contain one GRASP instance supporting multiple ASAs.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Done.</t>
<t>40. Add a "reason" code to the DECLINE option?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Done.</t>
<t>41. What happens if an ASA cannot conveniently use one of the GRASP mechanisms?
Do we (a) add a message type to GRASP, or (b) simply pass the discovery results to the ASA so
that it can open its own socket?<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Both would be possible, but (b) is preferred.</t>
<t>42. Do we need a feature whereby an ASA can bypass the ACP and use the data plane
for efficiency/throughput? This would require discovery to return non-ACP addresses
and would evade ACP security.<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: This is considered out of scope for GRASP, but a comment has been added
in security considerations. </t>
<t>43. Rapid mode synchronization and negotiation is currently limited to
a single objective for simplicity of design and implementation. A future
consideration is to allow multiple objectives in rapid mode for greater efficiency.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: This is considered out of scope for this version.</t>
<t>44. In requirement T9, the words that encryption "may not be required in all deployments"
were removed. Is that OK?.<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: No objections.</t>
<t>45. Device Identity Option is unused. Can we remove it completely?.<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: No objections. Done.</t>
<t>46. The 'initiator' field in DISCOVER, RESPONSE and FLOOD messages is intended to assist
in loop prevention. However, we also have the loop count for that. Also, if we create a new
Session ID each time a DISCOVER or FLOOD is relayed, that ID can be disambiguated
by recipients. It would be simpler to remove the initiator from the messages, making
parsing more uniform. Is that OK?<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Yes. Done.</t>
<t>47. REQUEST is a dual purpose message (request negotiation or request synchronization).
Would it be better to split this into two different messages (and adjust various
message names accordingly)?<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Yes. Done.</t>
<t>48. Should the Appendix "Capability Analysis of Current Protocols" be deleted before
RFC publication?<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: No (per WG meeting at IETF 96).</t>
<t>49. <xref target="reqsec"/> Should say more about signaling between two autonomic networks/domains.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Description of separate GRASP instance added.</t>
<t>50. Is Rapid mode limited to on-link only? What happens if first discovery responder does
not support Rapid Mode? <xref target="negproc"/>, <xref target="synchproc"/>)
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Not limited to on-link. First responder wins.</t>
<t>51. Should flooded objectives have a time-to-live before they are deleted from
the flood cache? And should they be tagged in the cache with their source locator?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: TTL added to Flood (and Discovery Response) messages. Cached flooded
objectives must be tagged with their originating ASA locator, and multiple copies must be kept if necessary.</t>
<t>52. Describe in detail what is allowed and disallowed in an insecure instance of GRASP.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Done.</t>
<t>53. Tune IANA Considerations to support early assignment request.<vspace blankLines="1"/></t>
<t>54. Is there a highly unlikely race condition if two peers simultaneously choose the
same Session ID and send each other simultaneous M_REQ_NEG messages?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Yes. Enhanced text on Session ID generation, and added precaution when
receiving a Request message.</t>
<t>55. Could discovery be performed over TCP?<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Unicast discovery added as an option.</t>
<t>56. Change Session-ID to 32 bits?<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Done.</t>
<t>57. Add M_INVALID message?<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED: Done.</t>
<t>58. Maximum message size?
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
RESOLVED by specifying default maximum message size (2048 bytes).</t>
</list></t>
</section>
<section anchor="changes" title="Change log [RFC Editor: Please remove]">
<t>draft-ietf-anima-grasp-08, 2016-10-30:
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Added M_INVALID message.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Increased Session ID space to 32 bits.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Enhanced rules to avoid Session ID clashes.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Corrected and completed description of timeouts for Request messages.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Improved wording about exponential backoff and DoS.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Clarified that discovery relaying is not done by limited security instances.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Corrected and expanded explanation of port used for Discovery Response.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Noted that Discovery message could be sent unicast in special cases.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Added paragraph on extensibility.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Specified default maximum message size.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Added Appendix for sample messages.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Added short protocol overview.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Editorial fixes, including minor re-ordering for readability.
</t>
<t>draft-ietf-anima-grasp-07, 2016-09-13:
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Added TTL field to Flood message (issue 51).
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Added Locator option to Flood message (issue 51).
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Added TTL field to Discovery Response message (corrollary to issue 51).
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Clarified details of rapid mode (issues 43 and 50).
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Description of inter-domain GRASP instance added (issue 49).
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Description of limited security GRASP instances added (issue 52).
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Strengthened advice to use TCP rather than UDP.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Updated IANA considerations and text about well-known port usage (issue 53).
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Amended text about ASA authorization and roles to allow for overlapping ASAs.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Added text recommending that Flood should be repeated periodically.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Editorial fixes.
</t>
<t>draft-ietf-anima-grasp-06, 2016-06-27:
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Added text on discovery cache timeouts.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Noted that ASAs that are only initiators do not need to respond to discovery message.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Added text on unexpected address changes.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Added text on robust implementation.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Clarifications and editorial fixes for numerous review comments
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Added open issues for some review comments.
</t>
<t>draft-ietf-anima-grasp-05, 2016-05-13:
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Noted in requirement T1 that it should be possible to implement ASAs independently as user space programs.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Added protocol number and port to discovery response. Updated protocol description, CDDL and IANA considerations accordingly.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Clarified that discovery and flood multicasts are handled by the GRASP kernel, not directly by ASAs.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Clarified that a node may discover an objective without supporting it for synchronization or negotiation.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Added Implementation Status section.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Added reference to SCSP.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Editorial fixes.
</t>
<t>draft-ietf-anima-grasp-04, 2016-03-11:
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Restored initiator field in certain messages and adjusted relaying rules
to provide complete loop detection.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Updated IANA Considerations.
</t>
<t>draft-ietf-anima-grasp-03, 2016-02-24:
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Removed initiator field from certain messages and adjusted relaying requirement
to simplify loop detection. Also clarified narrative explanation of discovery relaying.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Split Request message into two (Request Negotiation and Request Synchronization)
and updated other message names for clarity.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Dropped unused Device ID option.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Further clarified text on transport layer usage.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
New text about multicast insecurity in Security Considerations.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Various other clarifications and editorial fixes, including moving some material to Appendix.
</t>
<t>draft-ietf-anima-grasp-02, 2016-01-13:
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Resolved numerous issues according to WG discussions.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Renumbered requirements, added D9.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: only allow one objective in rapid mode.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: added optional error string to DECLINE option.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: removed statement that seemed to say that a Request not preceded
by a Discovery should cause a Discovery response. That made no sense, because there
is no way the initiator would know where to send the Request.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Removed PEN option from vendor objectives, changed naming rule
accordingly.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Added FLOOD message to simplify coding.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Added SYNCH message to simplify coding.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Added initiator id to DISCOVER, RESPONSE and FLOOD messages.
But also allowed the relay process for DISCOVER and FLOOD to regenerate a Session ID.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Require that discovered addresses must be global (except during bootstrap).
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Receiver of REQUEST message must close socket if no ASA is listening for the objective.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Simplified Waiting message.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Protocol change: Added No Operation message.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Renamed URL locator type as URI locator type.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Updated CDDL definition.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Various other clarifications and editorial fixes.
</t>
<t>draft-ietf-anima-grasp-01, 2015-10-09:
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Updated requirements after list discussion.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Changed from TLV to CBOR format - many detailed changes, added co-author.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Tightened up loop count and timeouts for various cases.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Noted that GRASP does not provide transactional integrity.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Various other clarifications and editorial fixes.
</t>
<t>draft-ietf-anima-grasp-00, 2015-08-14:
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
File name and protocol name changed following WG adoption.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Added URL locator type.
</t>
<t>draft-carpenter-anima-gdn-protocol-04, 2015-06-21:
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Tuned wording around hierarchical structure.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Changed "device" to "ASA" in many places.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Reformulated requirements to be clear that the ASA is the main customer
for signaling.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Added requirement for flooding unsolicited synch, and added it to protocol spec.
Recognized DNCP as alternative for flooding synch data.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Requirements clarified, expanded and rearranged following design team discussion.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Clarified that GDNP discovery must not
be a prerequisite for GDNP negotiation or synchronization (resolved issue 13).
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Specified flag bits for objective options (resolved issue 15).
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Clarified usage of ACP vs TLS/DTLS and TCP vs UDP (resolved issues 9,10,11).
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Updated DNCP description from latest DNCP draft.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Editorial improvements.</t>
<t>draft-carpenter-anima-gdn-protocol-03, 2015-04-20:
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Removed intrinsic security, required external security
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Format changes to allow DNCP co-existence
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Recognized DNS-SD as alternative discovery method.
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Editorial improvements</t>
<t>draft-carpenter-anima-gdn-protocol-02, 2015-02-19:
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Tuned requirements to clarify scope,
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Clarified relationship between types of objective,
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Clarified that objectives may be simple values or complex data structures,
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Improved description of objective options,
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Added loop-avoidance mechanisms (loop count and default timeout,
limitations on discovery relaying and on unsolicited responses),
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Allow multiple discovery objectives in one response,
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Provided for missing or multiple discovery responses,
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Indicated how modes such as "dry run" should be supported,
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Minor editorial and technical corrections and clarifications,
<vspace blankLines="1"/>
Reorganized future work list. </t>
<t>draft-carpenter-anima-gdn-protocol-01, restructured the logical flow of the document,
updated to describe synchronization completely, add unsolicited responses, numerous corrections
and clarifications, expanded future work list, 2015-01-06. </t>
<t>draft-carpenter-anima-gdn-protocol-00, combination
of draft-jiang-config-negotiation-ps-03 and
draft-jiang-config-negotiation-protocol-02, 2014-10-08.</t>
</section>
<section anchor="examples" title="Example Message Formats">
<t>For readers unfamiliar with CBOR, this appendix shows a number of example GRASP
messages conforming to the CDDL syntax given
in <xref target="cddl"/>. Each message is shown three times in the following formats:
<list style="numbers">
<t>CBOR diagnostic notation.</t>
<t>Similar, but showing the names of the constants.</t>
<t>Hexadecimal version of the CBOR wire format.</t>
</list>
Long lines are split for display purposes only.</t>
<section title="Discovery Example">
<t>The initiator multicasts a discovery message:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[1, 13948744, h'20010db8f000baaa28ccdc4c97036781', ["EX1", 2, 2, 0]]
[M_DISCOVERY, 13948744, h'20010db8f000baaa28ccdc4c97036781',
["EX1", F_SYNCH, 2, 0]]
h'84011a00d4d7485020010db8f000baaa28ccdc4c970367818463455831020200'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>A peer responds with a locator:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[2, 13948744, h'20010db8f000baaa28ccdc4c97036781', 60000,
[103, h'20010db8f000baaaf000baaaf000baaa', 6, 49443]]
[M_RESPONSE, 13948744, h'20010db8f000baaa28ccdc4c97036781', 60000,
[O_IPv6_LOCATOR, h'20010db8f000baaaf000baaaf000baaa',
IPPROTO_TCP, 49443]]
h'85021a00d4d7485020010db8f000baaa28ccdc4c9703678119ea6084186750
20010db8f000baaaf000baaaf000baaa0619c123'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
</section>
<section title="Flood Example">
<t>The initiator multicasts a flood message. There is no response:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[9, 3504974, h'20010db8f000baaa28ccdc4c97036781', 10000, [],
["EX1", 2, 2, ["Example 1 value=", 100]]]
[M_FLOOD, 3504974, h'20010db8f000baaa28ccdc4c97036781', 10000, [],
["EX1", F_SYNCH, 2, ["Example 1 value=", 100]]]
h'86091a00357b4e5020010db8f000baaa28ccdc4c9703678119271080846345
5831020282704578616d706c6520312076616c75653d1864'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
</section>
<section title="Synchronization Example">
<t>The initiator unicasts a request:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[4, 4038926, ["EX2", 2, 5, 0]]
[M_REQ_SYN, 4038926, ["EX2", F_SYNCH, 5, 0]]
h'83041a003da10e8463455832020500'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The peer responds with a value:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[8, 4038926, ["EX2", 2, 5, ["Example 2 value=", 200]]]
[M_SYNCH, 4038926, ["EX2", F_SYNCH, 5, ["Example 2 value=", 200]]]
h'83081a003da10e8463455832020582704578616d706c6520322076616c75653d18c8'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
</section>
<section title="Simple Negotiation Example">
<t>The initiator unicasts a request:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[3, 802813, ["EX3", 1, 6, ["NZD", 47]]]
[M_REQ_NEG, 802813, ["EX3", 1, 6, ["NZD", 47]]]
h'83031a000c3ffd8463455833010682634e5a44182f'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The peer responds with immediate acceptance. Note that no objective is needed,
because the initiator's request was accepted without change:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[6, 802813, [101]]
[M_END , 802813, [O_ACCEPT]]
h'83061a000c3ffd811865'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
</section>
<section title="Complete Negotiation Example">
<t>The initiator unicasts a request:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[3, 13767778, ["EX3", 1, 6, ["NZD", 410]]]
[M_REQ_NEG, 13767778, ["EX3", F_NEG, 6, ["NZD", 410]]]
h'83031a00d214628463455833010682634e5a4419019a'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The responder starts to negotiate (making an offer):</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[5, 13767778, ["EX3", 1, 6, ["NZD", 80]]]
[M_NEGOTIATE, 13767778, ["EX3", F_NEG, 6, ["NZD", 80]]]
h'83051a00d214628463455833010682634e5a441850'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The initiator continues to negotiate (reducing its request):</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[5, 13767778, ["EX3", 1, 5, ["NZD", 307]]]
[M_NEGOTIATE, 13767778, ["EX3", F_NEG, 5, ["NZD", 307]]]
h'83051a00d214628463455833010582634e5a44190133'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The responder asks for more time:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[7, 13767778, 34965]
[M_WAIT, 13767778, 34965]
h'83071a00d21462198895'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The responder continues to negotiate (increasing its offer):</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[5, 13767778, ["EX3", 1, 4, ["NZD", 120]]]
[M_NEGOTIATE, 13767778, ["EX3", F_NEG, 4, ["NZD", 120]]]
h'83051a00d214628463455833010482634e5a441878'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The initiator continues to negotiate (reducing its request):</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[5, 13767778, ["EX3", 1, 3, ["NZD", 246]]]
[M_NEGOTIATE, 13767778, ["EX3", F_NEG, 3, ["NZD", 246]]]
h'83051a00d214628463455833010382634e5a4418f6'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>The responder refuses to negotiate further:</t>
<t><figure>
<artwork><![CDATA[
[6, 13767778, [102, "Insufficient funds"]]
[M_END , 13767778, [O_DECLINE, "Insufficient funds"]]
h'83061a00d2146282186672496e73756666696369656e742066756e6473'
]]></artwork>
</figure></t>
<t>This negotiation has failed. If either side had sent
[M_END, 13767778, [O_ACCEPT]] it would have succeeded, converging
on the objective value in the preceding M_NEGOTIATE. Note that apart
from the initial M_REQ_NEG, the process is symmetrical.</t>
</section>
</section>
<section anchor="current" title="Capability Analysis of Current Protocols">
<t>This appendix discusses various existing protocols with properties
related to the requirements described in <xref target="reqts"/>. The
purpose is to evaluate whether any existing protocol, or a simple
combination of existing protocols, can meet those requirements.</t>
<t>Numerous protocols include some form of discovery, but these all appear to be very
specific in their applicability. Service Location Protocol (SLP)
<xref target="RFC2608"/> provides service discovery for managed networks,
but requires configuration of its own servers. DNS-SD <xref target="RFC6763"/>
combined with mDNS <xref target="RFC6762"/> provides service discovery for
small networks with a single link layer. <xref target="RFC7558"/>
aims to extend this to larger autonomous networks but this is not yet
standardized. However, both SLP and DNS-SD appear to
target primarily application layer services, not the layer 2 and 3 objectives
relevant to basic network configuration. Both SLP and DNS-SD are text-based protocols. </t>
<t>Routing protocols are mainly one-way information announcements. The
receiver makes independent decisions based on the received information
and there is no direct feedback information to the announcing peer. This
remains true even though the protocol is used in both directions between
peer routers; there is state synchronization, but no negotiation, and
each peer runs its route calculations independently.</t>
<t>Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) <xref target="RFC3416"/> uses
a command/response model not well suited for peer negotiation. Network Configuration
Protocol (NETCONF) <xref target="RFC6241"/> uses an RPC model that does allow positive or
negative responses from the target system, but this is still not
adequate for negotiation.</t>
<t>There are various existing protocols that have elementary negotiation
abilities, such as Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol for IPv6 (DHCPv6)
<xref target="RFC3315"/>, Neighbor Discovery (ND) <xref target="RFC4861"/>,
Port Control Protocol (PCP) <xref target="RFC6887"/>, Remote Authentication
Dial In User Service (RADIUS) <xref target="RFC2865"/>, Diameter <xref target="RFC6733"/>,
etc. Most of them are configuration or
management protocols. However, they either provide only a simple
request/response model in a master/slave context or very limited
negotiation abilities.</t>
<t>There are some signaling protocols with an element of negotiation.
For example Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) <xref target="RFC2205"/>
was designed for negotiating quality of service
parameters along the path of a unicast or multicast flow. RSVP is a very
specialised protocol aimed at end-to-end flows. However, it has some
flexibility, having been extended for MPLS label distribution <xref target="RFC3209"/>.
A more generic design is General Internet
Signalling Transport (GIST) <xref target="RFC5971"/>, but it is
complex, tries to solve many problems, and is also aimed at per-flow
signaling across many hops rather than at device-to-device signaling.
However, we cannot completely exclude extended RSVP or GIST as a
synchronization and negotiation protocol. They do not appear to be
directly useable for peer discovery.</t>
<t>We now consider two protocols that are works in progress at the time
of this writing. Firstly, RESTCONF <xref target="I-D.ietf-netconf-restconf"/>
is a protocol intended to
convey NETCONF information expressed in the YANG language via HTTP,
including the ability to transit HTML intermediaries. While this is a
powerful approach in the context of centralised configuration of a
complex network, it is not well adapted to efficient interactive
negotiation between peer devices, especially simple ones that might
not include YANG processing already.</t>
<t>Secondly, we consider Distributed Node Consensus Protocol (DNCP)
<xref target="RFC7787"/>. This is defined as a generic form
of state synchronization protocol, with a proposed usage profile being the
Home Networking Control Protocol (HNCP) <xref target="RFC7788"/>
for configuring Homenet routers. A specific application of DNCP for autonomic
networking was proposed in <xref target="I-D.stenberg-anima-adncp"/>.
</t>
<t>DNCP "is designed to provide a way for each participating node to
publish a set of TLV (Type-Length-Value) tuples, and to provide a
shared and common view about the data published... DNCP is most suitable
for data that changes only infrequently... If constant rapid
state changes are needed, the preferable choice is to use an
additional point-to-point channel..."</t>
<t>Specific features of DNCP include:
<list style="symbols">
<t>Every participating node has a unique node identifier.</t>
<t>DNCP messages are encoded as a sequence of TLV objects, sent over
unicast UDP or TCP, with or without (D)TLS security.</t>
<t>Multicast is used only for discovery of DNCP neighbors
when lower security is acceptable.</t>
<t>Synchronization of state is maintained by a flooding process using the Trickle algorithm.
There is no bilateral synchronization or negotiation capability.</t>
<t>The HNCP profile of DNCP is designed to operate between directly connected neighbors
on a shared link using UDP and link-local IPv6 addresses.</t>
</list>
DNCP does not meet the needs of a general negotiation protocol, because it is designed
specifically for flooding synchronization. Also, in its HNCP profile it is limited to link-local
messages and to IPv6. However, at the minimum it is a
very interesting test case for this style of interaction between devices
without needing a central authority, and it is a proven method of network-wide state
synchronization by flooding.</t>
<t>The Server Cache Synchronization Protocol (SCSP) <xref target="RFC2334"/> also describes
a method for cache synchronization and cache replication among a group of nodes.</t>
<t>A proposal was made some years ago for an IP based Generic Control Protocol
(IGCP) <xref target="I-D.chaparadza-intarea-igcp"/>. This was aimed
at information exchange and negotiation but not directly at peer
discovery. However, it has many points in common with the present work.</t>
<t>None of the above solutions appears to completely meet the needs of
generic discovery, state synchronization and negotiation in a single solution.
Many of the protocols assume that they are working in a traditional
top-down or north-south scenario, rather than a fluid peer-to-peer
scenario. Most of them are specialized in one way or another. As a result,
we have not identified a combination of existing protocols that meets the
requirements in <xref target="reqts"/>. Also, we have not identified a path
by which one of the existing protocols could be extended to meet the
requirements.
</t>
</section>
<!-- current -->
</back>
</rfc>
| PAFTECH AB 2003-2026 | 2026-04-22 05:06:51 |