Subject: Questions about the "Authentication Information" optional parameter

From: "Bruno Rijsman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 11:18:48 -0400

I have some questions about the "Authentication Information" optional 
parameter in the BGP OPEN message.

Have any authentication codes been defined anywhere?

Does any implementation actually support this method of authentication (as 
far as I know everyone uses RFC 2385 which uses a TCP MD5 signature 
instead)?

If it is not used in real life should we remove the "Authentication 
Information" optional parameter from the draft (or at least deprecate it)?

If no "Authentication Information" parameter was exchanged, it seems that 
the 16 marker bytes are a complete waste of space. Would it make sense to 
define a capability (or maybe an authentication code) which means 
"subsequent messages after the OPEN message will not contain the marker 
bytes".

_________________________________________________________________
Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. 
http://www.hotmail.com

---

From: Jeffrey Haas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 11:25:19 -0400

On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 11:18:48AM -0400, Bruno Rijsman wrote:
> the 16 marker bytes are a complete waste of space.

Note that in bgp 1-3, this field was used for synchronizing the start
of packet in the data stream.  It was in bgp 4 that this was changed
to be capable of being used for authentication.

There was also a change at some point of the size of the marker field.

Just following the rfc's in the evolution of bgp and reading the IDRP
field, the whole "authentication" bit has a very ISO feel to it.
The authors may be able to shed more light on this. :-)

In any case, you can't get rid of it without breaking backwards 
compatability.

> Would it make sense to 

Why bother?  Routing data doesn't consume that much bandwidth.

-- 
Jeff Haas 
NextHop Technologies