The Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (bfd) working group in the Routing Area of the IETF is undergoing rechartering. The IESG has not made any determination yet. The following draft charter was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send your comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg at ietf.org) by 2012-10-23. Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (bfd) ------------------------------------------------ Current Status: Active Working Group Chairs: David Ward <dward@cisco.com> Jeffrey Haas <jhaas@pfrc.org> Technical advisors: Dave Katz <dkatz@juniper.net> Assigned Area Director: Adrian Farrel <adrian@olddog.co.uk> Mailing list Address: rtg-bfd@ietf.org To Subscribe: rtg-bfd-request@ietf.org Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtg-bfd/ Charter of Working Group: The BFD Working Group is chartered to standardize and support the bidirectional forwarding detection protocol (BFD) and its extensions. A core goal of the working group is to standardize BFD in the context of IP routing, or protocols such as MPLS that are based on IP routing, in a way that will encourage multiple, inter-operable vendor implementations. The Working Group will also provide advice and guidance on BFD to other working groups or standards bodies as requested. BFD is a protocol intended to detect faults in the bidirectional path between two forwarding engines, including physical interfaces, subinterfaces, data link(s), and to the extent possible the forwarding engines themselves, with potentially very low latency. It operates independently of media, data protocols, and routing protocols. An additional goal is to provide a single mechanism that can be used for liveness detection over any media, at any protocol layer, with a wide range of detection times and overhead, to avoid a proliferation of different methods. Important characteristics of BFD include: - Simple, fixed-field encoding to facilitate implementations in hardware. - Independence of the data protocol being forwarded between two systems. BFD packets are carried as the payload of whatever encapsulating protocol is appropriate for the medium and network. - Path independence: BFD can provide failure detection on any kind of path between systems, including direct physical links, virtual circuits, tunnels, MPLS LSPs, multihop routed paths, and unidirectional links (so long as there is some return path, of course). - Ability to be bootstrapped by any other protocol that automatically forms peer, neighbor or adjacency relationships to seed BFD endpoint discovery. The working group is chartered to complete the following work items: 1. Develop the MIB module for BFD and submit it to the IESG for publication as a Proposed Standard. 2a. Provide a generic keying-based cryptographic authentication mechanism for the BFD protocol in discussion with the KARP working group. This mechanism will support authentication through a key identifier for the BFD session's Security Association rather than specifying new authentication extensions. 2b. Provide extensions to the BFD MIB in support of the generic keying-based cryptographic authentication mechanism. 2c. Specify cryptographic authentication procedures for the BFD protocol using HMAC-SHA-256 (possibly truncated to a smaller integrity check value) using the generic keying-based cryptographic authentication mechanism. 3. Provide an extension to the BFD core protocol in support of point-to- multipoint links and networks. 4. Assist the MPLS working group in the standardization of the BFD protocol for MPLS-TP. The preferred solution will be interoperable with the current BFD specification. 5. Provide one or more mechanisms to run BFD over Link Aggregation Group Interfaces. The working group will maintain a relationship with the KARP and MPLS working groups, and will communicate with the IEEE with respect to BFD over LAGs. Milestones: Done - Submit the base protocol specification to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Done - Submit BFD encapsulation and usage profile for single-hop IPv4 and IPv6 adjacencies to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Done - Submit BFD encapsulation and usage profile for MPLS LSPs to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Done - Submit BFD encapsulation and usage profile for multi-hop IPv4 and IPv6 adjacencies to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Sep 2011 - Submit the BFD MIB to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Dec 2011 - Submit the generic keying based cryptographic authentication mechanism to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Dec 2011 - Submit a BFD MIB extension in support of the generic keying document to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Dec 2011 - Submit the cryptographic authentication procedures for BFD to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Mar 2012 - Submit the the document on BFD point-to-multipoint support to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard Jun 2012 - Submit the bootstrapping mechanism for BFD using DHCP to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard
