Subject: [OPSEC] Lars Eggert's No Objection on draft-ietf-opsec-ipv6-eh-filtering-08: (with COMMENT)

From: Lars Eggert via Datatracker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2021 05:46:43 -0700

Lars Eggert has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-opsec-ipv6-eh-filtering-08: No Objection

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COMMENT:
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This is mostly a personal style issue, but I find large parts of the document
hard to read, because of a myriad of very short (1-2 line) subsections, each
with their own repetitive section heading.

Section 2.3. , paragraph 7, comment:
>    We recommend that configuration options are made available to govern
>    the processing of each IPv6 EH type and each IPv6 option type.  Such
>    configuration options should include the following possible settings:

Out of curiosity, is there a reason a "strip option and forward packet" isn't
one of the options below?

Section 3.2. , paragraph 2, comment:
>    In some device architectures, IPv6 packets that contain IPv6 EHs can
>    cause the corresponding packets to be processed on the slow path, and
>    hence may be leveraged for the purpose of Denial of Service (DoS)
>    attacks [I-D.ietf-v6ops-ipv6-ehs-packet-drops] [Cisco-EH]
>    [FW-Benchmark].

Do such device architectures really still exist in 2021? The [Cisco-EH]
reference is from 2006, and the URL in [FW-Benchmark] does not seem to return
content. ([I-D.ietf-v6ops-ipv6-ehs-packet-drops] seemed to only refer to those
two references as well.)

Section 3.4.1.2. , paragraph 2, comment:
>    This EH is specified in [RFC8200].  At the time of this writing, the
>    following options have been specified for the Hop-by-Hop Options EH:

Wouldn't a pointer to the respective IANA registry suffice here, rather than a
list that is going to be inaccurate with time?
(And reading on, I see that other subsections contain similar "at the time of
this writing" lists; I would suggest replacing them all with pointers to the
respective registries.)

Document has Informational status, but uses RFC2119 keywords.

Found terminology that should be reviewed for inclusivity; see
https://www.rfc-editor.org/part2/#inclusive_language for background and more
guidance:

 * Term "his"; alternatives might be "they", "them", "their".

 * Term "traditional"; alternatives might be "classic", "classical",
   "common", "conventional", "customary", "fixed", "habitual", "historic",
   "long-established", "popular", "prescribed", "regular", "rooted",
   "time-honored", "universal", "widely used", "widespread".

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All comments below are about very minor potential issues that you may choose to
address in some way - or ignore - as you see fit. Some were flagged by
automated tools (via https://github.com/larseggert/ietf-reviewtool), so there
will likely be some false positives. There is no need to let me know what you
did with these suggestions.

Section 4.3.3.1. , paragraph 2, nit:
>  This option is meant to survive outside of an RPL instance. As a result, di
>                                  ^^^^^^^^^^
This phrase is redundant. Consider using "outside".

Section 4.3.8.4. , paragraph 2, nit:
> n intermediate system can know whether or not that particular intermediate s
>                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Consider shortening this phrase to just "whether". It is correct though if you
mean "regardless of whether".

Document references draft-ietf-v6ops-ipv6-ehs-packet-drops-06, but -08 is the
latest available revision.

Obsolete reference to RFC2460, obsoleted by RFC8200 (this may be on purpose).

These URLs in the document did not return content:
 *
 http://www.ipv6hackers.org/meetings/ipv6-hackers-1/zack-ipv6hackers1-firewall-security-assessment-and-benchmarking.pdf

These URLs in the document can probably be converted to HTTPS:
 *
 http://www.cisco.com/en/US/technologies/tk648/tk872/technologies_white_paper0900aecd8054d37d.pdf
 * http://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-numbers/protocol-numbers.xhtml *
 http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-parameters/ipv6-parameters.xhtml