Subject: Protocol Action: 'Applicability Statement for the use of IPv6 UDP Datagrams with Zero Checksums' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-6man-udpzero-12.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 08 Mar 2013 10:34:30 -0800

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Applicability Statement for the use of IPv6 UDP Datagrams with Zero
   Checksums'
  (draft-ietf-6man-udpzero-12.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the IPv6 Maintenance Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Brian Haberman and Ralph Droms.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-6man-udpzero/

Technical Summary:

This document examines the role of the UDP transport checksum when
used with IPv6, as defined in RFC2460. It presents a summary of the
trade-offs for evaluating the safety of updating RFC 2460 to permit
an IPv6 UDP endpoint to use a zero value in the checksum field as
an indication that no checksum is present. This method is compared
with some other possibilities. The document also describes the
issues and design principles that need to be considered when UDP is
used with IPv6 to support tunnel encapsulations. It concludes that
UDP with a zero checksum in IPv6 can safely be used for tunneling,
provided that this usage is governed by a set of constraints.

Working Group Summary:

There is strong consensus within the 6MAN WG to publish this document
since it outlines the guidance for loosening the requirement on generating
a UDP checksum in some situations. Most of the discussion
in the working group was on the companion document:
draft-ietf-6man-udpchecksums.

Document Quality:

This document received reviews from the 6MAN WG and members of the
Transport Directorate.

Personnel:

Ole Troan is the Document Shepherd.
Brian Haberman is the Responsible Area Director.