A new IETF working group has been formed in the Transport Area. For additional information, please contact the Area Directors or the WG Chairs. Behavior Engineering for Hindrance Avoidance (behave) ===================================================== Current Status: Active Working Group CHAIRS: Cullen Jennings <fluffy@cisco.com> Jiri Kuthan <jiri@iptel.org> Transport Area Director(s): Allison Mankin <mankin@psg.com> Jon Peterson <jon.peterson@neustar.biz> Transport Area Advisor: Jon Peterson <jon.peterson@neustar.biz> MAILING LISTS: General Discussion: ietf-behave@list.sipfoundry.org To Subscribe: ietf-behave-request@list.sipfoundry.org with subscribe in body Archive: http://list.sipfoundry.org/archive/ietf-behave DESCRIPTION: Given the current near-universal deployment of NATs (Network Address Translators) in the public Internet, the lack of standards for NAT behavior has given rise to a crisis. While it is widely acknowledged that NATs create problems for numerous Internet applications, our inability to describe precisely what a NAT is or how it behaves leaves us few solutions for compensating for the presence of NATs. The behavior of NATs varies dramatically from one implementation to another.As a result it is very difficult for applications to predict or discover the behavior of these devices. Predicting and/or discovering the behavior of NATs is important for designing application protocols and NAT traversal techniques that work reliably in existing networks. This situation is especially problematic for end-to-end interactive applications such as multiuser games and interactive multimedia. NATs continue to proliferate and have seen an increasing rate of deployment. IPv6 deployments can eliminate this problem, but there is a significant interim period in which applications will need to work both in IPv4 NAT environments and with the IPv6 to IPv4 transition mechanisms. This working group proposes to generate requirements documents and best current practices to enable NATs to function in as deterministic a fashion as possible. It will consider what is broken by these devices and document approaches for characterizing and testing them. The NAT behavior practices will be application independent. The group will also advise on how to develop applications that discover and reliably function in environments with NATs that follow the best current practices identified by this working group. The group will consider the security implications (or non-implications) of these devices. The work will be done with the goal of encouraging eventual migration to IPv6 and compliance with the UNSAF [RFC 3424] considerations. It will not encourage the proliferation of NATs. The behavior that will be considered includes IP fragmentation and parameters that impact ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP, MLD, and multicast. The proposed WG will coordinate with v6ops, midcom and nsis. The work is largely limited to examining various approaches that are already in use today and providing suggestions about which ones are likely to work best in the internet architecture. Discussion will start from several existing drafts or RFCs, including: draft-jennings-midcom-stun-results draft-audet-nat-behave RFC 3489 draft-ford-midcom-p2p Goals & Milestones Mar 05 - Produce a BCP document that describes the usage of protocols like STUN for performing black-box testing and characterizing NAT behavior May 05 - Produce a BCP that defines unicast UDP behavioral requirements for NATs Jul 05 - Any revisions to STUN required by other WG deliverables Sep 05 - Produce a BCP that defines TCP behavioral requirements for NATs Nov 05 - Produce a BCP that defines basic ICMP behavioral requirements for NATs Dec 05 - Produce a BCP that discusses protocol design techniques for using the existing set of NAT traversal approaches Jan 06 - Close WG or recharter _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
