Requirements for domain marking for the purpose of Upstream Traffic Characterization
draft-schwartz-sipping-domain-marking-requirements-00.txt

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Abstract

SIP as defined in RFC 3261 [SIP] (Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., Camarillo, G., Johnston, A., Peterson, J., Sparks, R., Handley, M., and E. Schooler, “SIP: Session Initiation Protocol,” June 2002.) defines a Via header as a construct to be used for upstream response routing and for downstream assistance in loop detection. There is an increasing need on downstream administrative domains (ADs) to gain visibility into all the ADs in its upstream path. The information needed is not IP based as internal architectures at upstream ADs is of no consequence to downstream ADs. Logical domain marking, however, is desperately needed for any traffic analysis to occur at the receiving side. Gathering AD information from Via headers is non obvious and in many instances nearly impossible. This documents identifies the requirements for addressing this issue.

Table of Contents

1.  Introduction
2.  Terminology
3.  Requirements
4.  Open Issues
5.  Security Considerations
6.  IANA Considerations
7.  Acknowledgements
8.  Normative References
§  Authors' Addresses
§  Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements

1.  Introduction

When receiving a SIP request from an upstream Administrative Domain (AD) there is no easy way of identifying administrative domains traversed by the SIP request prior to arrival at the current AD. While Via information may be available (depending on presence of upstream B2BUA), its presence alone may not necessarily shed light onto the path traversed in terms of which ADs were hit as there is no assurance that a domain name appears in any of the Vias.

A downstream AD may wish to characterize traffic entering his domain for reasons such as SPIT detection or simply to gain visibility into the traffic patterns arriving at his servers.

This document identifies requirements for a new header that can be used to pass Administrative Domain Identities downstream in a SIP request.

2.  Terminology

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119] (Bradner, S., “Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels,” March 1997.). In addition to the above, Terminology in this document makes use of the following terminology:

Administrative Domain (AD): A collection of SIP entities, managed by a single administrative authority

Ingress Border SIP Entity (IBSE): The first SIP entity within AD to process an incoming SIP request from an upstream node

AD Unique Identifier (ADUI): An identifier that is unique only within the context of an Administrative Domain

3.  Requirements

Req 1: It MUST be possible for the first SIP element in an Administrative Domain (AD) or the IBSE to uniquely identify the source of an incoming SIP request.

Req 2: It MUST be possible for the IBSE to associate a unique identifier (ADUI) to a source and to maintain this ADUI for all future requests received from this source.

Req 3: It MUST not be possible for downstream ADs to gain any information about upstream ADs from the ADUI list other than their uniqueness.

Req 4: It MUST be possible for the ADUI to be appended to a list of ADUIs added by ADs traversed prior to current AD.

4.  Open Issues

Should this mechanism be extended to SIP responses as well?

Should there be any requirements on the strength of uniqueness of the ADUI?

Do we want to allow for sub markings within an AD?

5.  Security Considerations

This document describes the requirements for a new header to assist in downstream traffic characterization. The security concerns are related to the ability of certain entities to create/modify/delete the unique ID described above. Any implementation of this document will have to address these issues at greater depth.

6.  IANA Considerations

This document does not require actions by IANA.

7.  Acknowledgements

Many Thanks to Brocha Strous of Kayote Networks and Jeremy Barkan of DigitalShtick for their insightful comments leading to the publication of this document.

8.  Normative References

Authors' Addresses

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