The IESG has approved the Internet-Draft 'Robust ECN Signaling with Nonces' <draft-ietf-tsvwg-tcp-nonce-04.txt> as an Experimental RFC. This document is the product of the Transport Area Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Scott Bradner and Allison Mankin. Technical Summary This specification describes the ECN-nonce, an optional addition to Explicit Congestion Notification (RFC 3168) that protects against accidental or malicious concealment of marked packets from the TCP sender. It improves the robustness of congestion control by preventing receivers from exploiting ECN to gain an unfair share of network bandwidth. The ECN-nonce uses the two ECT codepoints in the ECN field of the IP header, and requires a flag in the TCP header. It is computationally efficient for both routers and hosts. Working Group Summary The working group supported publishing of this document and the Last Call discussion of the document raised no issues with the quality of the document. Protocol Quality There are implementations of the nonce algorithm and bits accompanying the implementations of RFC 3168, the Explicit Congestion Notification Proposed Standard. The specification was reviewed for the IESG by Allison Mankin and Randy Bush. RFC Editor Note: RFC-Editor, please add the following text after the Abstract: Statement of Intent: This specification contains an optional addition to Explicit Congestion Notification (RFC 3168) improving its robustness against malicious or accidental concealment of marked packets. It has not been deployed widely. One goal of publication as an as an Experimental RFC is to be prudent, and encourage use and deployment prior to publication in the standards track. Another consideration is to give time for firewall developers to accept and recognize the pattern presented by the nonce. It is the intent of the Transport Area to re-submit this specification as an IETF Proposed Standard in future after more experience has been gained. RFC-Editor, please also expand the acronyms in the abstract on first appearance: Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) ECN-Capable Transport (ECT)
