Subject: Protocol Action: 'Homenet profile of the Babel routing protocol' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-homenet-babel-profile-07.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2018 11:08:27 -0700

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Homenet profile of the Babel routing protocol'
  (draft-ietf-homenet-babel-profile-07.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Home Networking Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Suresh Krishnan and Terry Manderson.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-homenet-babel-profile/

Technical Summary

   This document defines the subset of the Babel routing protocol [RFC6126bis] and its extensions that a Homenet router must implement, as well as the interactions between HNCP [RFC7788] and Babel.

Working Group Summary

   When this draft was adopted by the WG in 2015, there was extremely contentious debate regarding what protocol to select as the recommended homenet routing protocol. It was agreed at that time that this draft would be adopted as Experimental. Over the past 2 years, no other homenet routing protocol profiles have been proposed. The Babel protocol has completed WG Last Call as a Proposed Standard in babel WG.

There has also been considerable debate related to recommendations for securing the Babel protocol and HNCP [RFC7788]. There appears to be general agreement that it is acceptable to allow these protocols to operate without encryption or signatures in the homenet environment. This is not meant to preclude further work on cryptographically securing both protocols; the homenet and babel WGs are continuing work on this.

Document Quality

   This document specifies a profile of the Babel protocol and Babel-specific HNCP protocol elements, and not a protocol itself. There are multiple, interoperable implementations of the Babel protocol (including the Babel source-specific routing extension) and HNCP protocol and of the profile defined in this draft. The number of requirements needed to specify the profile are minimal, and there have been no major changes to the profile defined in this draft. Several people have reviewed and provided comments, including one early security review (Leif Johansson). The review of the base protocol definition is being done in the babel WG.

Personnel

   Document Shepherd is Barbara Stark. Responsible AD is Terry Manderson.