Subject: Protocol Action: 'Hash Based Addresses (HBA)' to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:29:18 -0500

The IESG has approved the following document:

- 'Hash Based Addresses (HBA) '
   <draft-ietf-shim6-hba-05.txt> as a Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Site Multihoming by IPv6 
Intermediation Working Group. 

The IESG contact persons are Jari Arkko and Mark Townsley.

A URL of this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-shim6-hba-05.txt

Technical Summary
 
  Hash Based Addresses are intended to provide a secure binding
  between the multiple addresses with different prefixes available
  to a host within a multihomed site.  Information about the
  multiple prefixes is included within the addresses by generating
  the interface identifiers of the addresses of a host as hashes of
  the set of available prefixes and a random number, which are then
  appended to the the different prefixes.  The result is a set of
  addresses that are inherently bound together such that given one
  valid address out of the group, the prefix set and the random
  number, it is possible to determine whether another address is
  part of the group by computing the hash and checking against the
  interface identifier value.

Working Group Summary
 
  The document has extensively reviewed by the Working Group and by
  the Security Area Directorate. The Working Group consensus was to
  recommend publication of this document as a Proposed Standard.
  
Protocol Quality

  Jari Arkko has reviewed this specification for the IESG.
 
  There are known implementations of this specification, and there
  have been no implemtation experiences that have implied any
  further revision to this specification is required.

Note to RFC Editor
 
  Please add a new subsection:

  11.x.DoS attacks considerations

In order to use the HBA technique, the owner of the HBA set must inform
about the CGA Parameter Data Structure to its peer in order to allow the
peer to verify tat the different HBAs belong to the same HBA set. Such
information must then be stored by the peer to verify alternative
addresses in the future. This can be a vector for DoS attacks, since the
peer must commit resources (in this particular case memory) to be able to
use the HBA technique for address verification. It is then possible for an
attacker to launch a DoS attack by conveying HBA information to a victim,
imposing the victim to use memory for storing HBA related state, and
eventually running out of memory for other genuine operations. In order to
prevent such attack, protocols that use the HBA technique should implement
proper DoS prevention techniques. For instance, the Shim6 protocol
(draft-ietf-shim6-proto] includes a 4-way handshake to establish the Shim6
context and in particular to establish the HBA-related state. In this
4-way handshake, the receiver remains stateless during the first 2
messages, while the initiator must keep state throughout the exchange of
the 4 messages, so that the cost of the context establishment is higher in
memory terms for the initiator (i.e. the potential attacker) than for the
receiver (i.e. the potential victim). In addition to that, the 4-way
handshake, prevents the usage of spoofed addresses from off-path attacker,
since the initiator must be able to receive information through the
address it has used as source address, enabling the tracking of the
location from which the attack was launched from.

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