Subject: Re: [Anima] CoAP et al

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2016 01:06:31 -0700

Thanks, Eliott

Quick questions:

a) Would those Fairhair devices ever be transit nodes ("routers") in the
   network itself ? Or even when only being leafs of the topology,
   would they intend to run RPL ?

b) Any specific way how these devices get their IP (IPv6 ?) addresses ?

I am wondering, because i wonder how much more anima than bootstrap could
be applicable to Fairhair devices.

Cheers
    Toerless

In-Reply-To: <[email-masked]>

On Wed, Aug 03, 2016 at 03:55:36PM +0200, Eliot Lear wrote:
> Dear authors of draft-ietf-anima-bootstrapping-keyinfra and WG,
> 
> The Fairhair alliance focuses on lighting and building automation.  Our
> security team has been reviewing your draft, and we appreciate the
> effort that you are devoting in this direction.  We would just like to
> highlight at this junction that there is a preference for device
> communications from the autonomic device to the registrar to be via COAP
> over DTLS rather than HTTP over TLS, primarily because the devices that
> we are working with will already have a CoAP implementation.  As such,
> there is some interest in draft-pritikin-coap-bootstrap-03.txt.  We look
> forward to seeing that work further developed.
> 
> On behalf of the Fairhair security subgroup,
> 
> Eliot
> 
> ps: as usual, I will encourage fairhair members to directly chime in
> with their own views on this matter.
> 
> 
> 

> _______________________________________________
> Anima mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/anima

-- 
---
Toerless Eckert, [email-masked]

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2016 10:17:37 +0200

>    would they intend to run RPL ?

TBD, I think.

> b) Any specific way how these devices get their IP (IPv6 ?) addresses ?

There will be multiple models in play, based on the operational
environment.  In some cases, 802.15.4 networks will be used, in others,
wired, in some cases WiFi.  Likely devices will start out with IPv4 and
require DHCP, and then in IPv6 both SLAAC and DHCP will be required.

But this is my personal view.

Eliot

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2016 04:50:53 -0700

Thanks Eliot

Would be useful i think to have the fairhair group consider some options:

- If devices use some "mesh" like topology, they easily could become
  transit node, then RPL is a very lightweight routing option.

- Even if device is a leaf, participating in RPL would be comparable
  lightweight to eg: DHCP or other protocols (hopefully some expecrts
  can chime in to refute or support that statement ;-). And RPL would
  allow to simplify learning parameters and addressing.

- Instead of SLAAC/DHCP, it might be quite interesting to consider
  an addressing model as we have it in ANIMA: Where the address is effectively
  configured during bootstrap (in ANIMA case into the Certificate).

- With this type of statically provisioned IPv6 address on device and
  RPL, it is extremely simple to keep track of the device in a database
  (no dynamic remapping of IP address to device required), and on
  the RPL root (which could be co-located with a controller, you would
  also see as RPL routes all devices present in the network by their
  address.

These IMHO are the most attractive options from the full anima model
(beyond bootstrap) for lightweight IoT devices - RPL routing/bootstrap
provisioned static IPv6 addresses. Eliminates IMHO some layers of complexity.

Cheers
    Toerless