Dear Tal,

Comments inline

On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Tal Mizrahi <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Balaji,
>
> A few clarification questions - I think it would be good to clarify these
> issues in the draft:
> 1.      Since the label hopping mechanism relies on PTP, I understand that
> PTP traffic itself does not use label hopping, right?
>

The PTP traffic itself does not use label hopping.


> 2.      Is there something preventing the attacker from attacking PTP,
> thus causing DoS to the data plane?
>

It would be difficult for the attacker to identify which LSP is the PTP LSP
for a specific VPN traffic (flow / set of flows) that is protected by this
scheme. There is no information except on the ingress and egress PEs that
identifies which is the PTP LSP for a particular VPN traffic protected by
this scheme.

3.      Is the "additional label" similar to an Integrity Check Value (ICV)
> computed over part of the packet header?
>

It serves as a digest from which certain specific bits are chosen to become
the innermost label. Which bits are chosen depends upon the bitmask
exchanged during the control plane.


> 4.      Is there something in your approach that would prevent an attacker
> from a replay attack?
>

For a reply attack to succeed, the replay should time the labels correctly
otherwise the traffic gets rejected.

5.      Looking at "Algorithm 3" I was not sure: does the receiver check
> two consequent time slots? I could not see such a check. I am referring to
> a case where the sender transmits at the end of a time slot, and the packet
> is received at the beginning of the next time slot. That would mean the
> receiver has to be able to tolerate two concurrent time slots, right?
>

Yes. It is available as +or- 1 unit (usually seconds) in the algorithm.
Maybe a little more fine tuning is required on this.


> 6.      The security parameters K, TS, A, I are exchanged over a secure
> link, which basically assumes there is a pre-shared key between the peer
> PEs. A naive question would be: how is your approach better than just using
> a standard ICV, based on the existing pre-shared key?
>

While the ICV may protect against modification of the inner payload one
cannot prevent spoofing attacks if the algorithm for the ICV is deduced.
Our scheme provides facility to change the labels from time slice to time
slice so that guessing what packet belongs to which VPN traffic itself
becomes difficult. This is the first line of defense. If we provide ICV
alone we protect against modification but not with replay attacks. The
proposed scheme protects against VPN traffic identification (so replay
attacks cannot be made) and modification as well through the ICV which is
the innermost label.

thanks and regards,
balaji , shankar and bhargav

>
> Tal.
>
>
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