Subject: Last Call: <draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums-04.txt> (UDP Checksums for Tunneled Packets) to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2012 09:55:52 -0700

The IESG has received a request from the IPv6 Maintenance WG (6man) to
consider the following document:
- 'UDP Checksums for Tunneled Packets'
  <draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums-04.txt> as Proposed Standard

The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
final comments on this action. Please send substantive comments to the
[email-masked] mailing lists by 2012-10-02. Exceptionally, comments may be
sent to [email-masked] instead. In either case, please retain the
beginning of the Subject line to allow automated sorting.

Abstract

   This document provides an update of the Internet Protocol version 6
   (IPv6) specification (RFC2460) to improve the performance of IPv6 in
   the use case when a tunnel protocol uses UDP with IPv6 to tunnel
   packets.  The performance improvement is obtained by relaxing the
   IPv6 UDP checksum requirement for suitable tunneling protocol where
   header information is protected on the "inner" packet being carried.
   This relaxation removes the overhead associated with the computation
   of UDP checksums on IPv6 packets used to carry tunnel protocols and
   thereby improves the efficiency of the traversal of firewalls and
   other network middleboxes by such protocols.  We describe how the
   IPv6 UDP checksum requirement can be relaxed in the situation where
   the encapsulated packet itself contains a checksum, the limitations
   and risks of this approach, and defines restrictions on the use of
   this relaxation to mitigate these risks.

The file can be obtained via
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums/

IESG discussion can be tracked via
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums/ballot/

No IPR declarations have been submitted directly on this I-D.