Subject: [manet] Benoit Claise's No Objection on draft-ietf-manet-olsrv2-sec-threats-03: (with COMMENT)

From: "Benoit Claise" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:34:46 -0800

Benoit Claise has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-manet-olsrv2-sec-threats-03: No Objection

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COMMENT:
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Below is cut/pasted Victor Kuarsingh's OPS DIR review.

Summary:

The document analyzes currently assessed (known) security threats for the
OLSRv2 protocol and how these threats may impact a Mobile Ad Hoc Network
(MANET).  The document points to reference documents such as RFC7186,
RFC7183, RFC7188 and RFC7181 and expands on the explanation of security
vulnerabilities and how such vulnerabilities can be mitigated by
currently documented security mechanisms.

Text updates (suggestions / recommendations) are provided below the
general feedback.

General Comments and Feedback:

Overall the document does cover the intention described per the abstract
(summarized above).   Descriptions of the vulnerabilities seem consistent
with documents such as RFC7186 and RFC8183 which already cover detailed
explanation of similar material.  

A few comments are noted in the in-line text overview below (some NITs /
suggestions on wording), and a preference for avoiding such conventions
which use taxonomy like "fresh", "lie" with preference for other options
like "recent", "incorrect/ erroneous " may be better suited for such a
document.

Given this document is attempting to provide a incremental analysis of
the security threats vs. how such threats fair with known security
mechanisms in place, I would recommend that the a slight incremental bit
of text (in-line or separate table) to show which mechanisms are purely
related to implementation level protection (i.e. software written to
enable protocol function) vs. deployment level options.  It appears most
of the protections are implementation level, but there seems to (at
least) two examples of mitigations which may be deployment level (e.g. it
was noted about IP forwarding on Linux boxes as well as wormholes which
create [potentially undesirable] direct comm paths between participating
nodes.). I think noting surveillance related activity for compromised
hosts may also be useful to discuss in section 6 (hard to detect, but a
potential threat).

Other then that, I find the document useful as an analysis which
discusses how the known threats are potentially mitigated by known
mitigations.   There are a few more editing items that can be found, but
that can be addressed by the RFC editor.

Section Review of -  Security Threats for the Optimized Link State
Routing Protocol version 2 (OLSRv2)

Abstract - ok

Introduction 

1. P2 

<old> operating with the assumption, that participants can

   be "trusted" to behave in a non-destructive way, is utopia.

<suggested>

operating with the assumption, that participants can

   be "trusted" to behave in a non-destructive way, is utopian.

P4

<old>  A first step towards hardening against attacks disrupting the

   connectivity of a network, is to understand the vulnerabilities of

   routing protocol,

<suggested>  A first step towards hardening against attacks disrupting
the

   connectivity of a network, is to understand the vulnerabilities of
the

   routing protocol,

1.1. OSLRv2 Overview

P1

<old> They are described in the below with sufficient..

<suggested> They are described in the sections below with sufficient..

1.1.1. Neighbour Discovery

Good

1.1.2 MPR Selection

Good

1.2 Link State Advertisement 

OK

1.3 OLSRv2 Attack Vectors

** use of honestly, lie, etc **.

2. Terminology

** for compromised router, it’s possible that only surveillance is the
goal (may not actually send erroneous or incorrect information) ** . This
may not be detectable, but dangerous none-the-less.

3. Topology Map Acquisition

OK

3.1 Attack on Jittering

OK

3.2 Hop-Count and Hop-limit Attacks

OK

3.2.1 Modifying the Hop Limit

OK

3.2.2 Modifying the Hop Count

OK

4. Effective Topology

OK

4.1 Incorrect Forwarding

** IP forwarding can also be turned of on commercial routers as well via
config - quite easily **  Likely ops level mitigation needed.

4.2 Wormholes

** comment on section above.  **

4.3 Sequence Number Attacks

P1

<comment> Not sure the word “fresher” in the sentence “long paths or
other delays, is not allowed to

   overwrite fresher information” is the best choice.  Technically, the
latter arriving message due to delay/etc is fresher from the receivers
point of view, but less desirable given the delay or path.

4.3.1 Message Sequence Number

<comment> similar to above comment, perhaps “recent” is a better word to
use vs. “Fresh” in the sentence “”Routers will retain this larger ANSN as
"the most fresh information" and …””

4.4 Indirect Jamming 

OK

5. Inconsistent Topologies

OK

5.1 Identity Spoofing

OK

5.2 Link Spoofing

OK

5.2.1 Inconsistent Topology Maps due to Link State Advertisements 

6. Mitigation of Security Vulnerabilities for OLSRv2

OK

6.1 Inherent OLSRv2 Resilience

OK

6.2 Resilience by using RFC7183 with OLSRv2

OK

6.2.1 Topology Map Acquisition

OK

6.2.2 Effective Topology

OK

6.2.3 Inconsistent Topology

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From: Jiazi Yi <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:23:14 +0100

Dear Benoit, 

Thanks very much for your detailed review. 
A new revision (-04) has been updated considering the comments provided. 

Other than the editorial issues, we added a short subsection 6.3 to call out the importance of correct deployment for mitigating some of the vulnerabilities. 

regards

Jiazi

> On 5 Jan 2017, at 09:34, Benoit Claise <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> _______________________________________________
> manet mailing list
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From: Benoit Claise <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2017 08:34:56 +0100

Thanks Jiazi,

Regards, B.
> .