Subject: Document Action: 'Layer-3 Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel traffic leakages in dual- stack hosts/networks' to Informational RFC (draft-ietf-opsec-vpn-leakages-06.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2014 08:48:51 -0700

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Layer-3 Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel traffic leakages in dual-
   stack hosts/networks'
  (draft-ietf-opsec-vpn-leakages-06.txt) as Informational RFC

This document is the product of the Operational Security Capabilities for
IP Network Infrastructure Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Joel Jaeggli and Benoit Claise.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-opsec-vpn-leakages/

Technical Summary

Due to the lack of proper IPv6 support in some popular Virtual Private
Network (VPN) products, traffic meant to be transferred over a VPN
connection may leak out of such connection and be transferred in the
clear from the local network to the final destination.

This document discusses some scenarios in which such leakages may
occur and discusses possible mitigations.

Working Group Summary

There was no drama in the WG regarding this draft.

The document is well written and easy to understand.
There was good support in the WG for progressing this document. Merike
Kaeo in particular provided good review and comments. There was decent 
feedback that resulted in changes during IETF LC.

Document Quality

The document is well written and easy to understand.
There was good support in the WG for progressing this document. Merike
Kaeo in particular provided good review and comments.

Personnel

Warren Kumari is the Document Shepherd. Joel Jaeggli is Responsible AD.

RFC Editor Note

Note, please add the IESG note.

IESG Note

This document describes a problem of information leakage in VPN software 
and attributes that problem to the software's inability to deal with 
IPv6. We do not think this is an appropriate characterization of the 
problem. It is true that when a device supports more than one address 
family, the inability to apply policy to more than one address family on 
that device is a defect. Despite that, inadvertent or maliciously-
induced information leakage may also occur due to the existence of any 
unencrypted interface allowed on the system, including the configuration 
of split tunnels in the VPN software itself.  While there are some 
attacks that are unique to an IPv6 interface, the sort of information 
leakage described by this document is a general problem that is not 
unique to the situation of IPv6-unaware VPN software. We do not think 
this document sufficiently describes the general issue.