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7 Network Working Group M. Handley
8 Request for Comments: 2974 ACIRI
9 Category: Experimental C. Perkins
10 USC/ISI
11 E. Whelan
12 UCL
13 October 2000
14
15
16 Session Announcement Protocol
17
18 Status of this Memo
19
20 This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet
21 community. It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.
22 Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested.
23 Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
24
25 Copyright Notice
26
27 Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000). All Rights Reserved.
28
29 Abstract
30
31 This document describes version 2 of the multicast session directory
32 announcement protocol, Session Announcement Protocol (SAP), and the
33 related issues affecting security and scalability that should be
34 taken into account by implementors.
35
36 1 Introduction
37
38 In order to assist the advertisement of multicast multimedia
39 conferences and other multicast sessions, and to communicate the
40 relevant session setup information to prospective participants, a
41 distributed session directory may be used. An instance of such a
42 session directory periodically multicasts packets containing a
43 description of the session, and these advertisements are received by
44 other session directories such that potential remote participants can
45 use the session description to start the tools required to
46 participate in the session.
47
48 This memo describes the issues involved in the multicast announcement
49 of session description information and defines an announcement
50 protocol to be used. Sessions are described using the session
51 description protocol which is described in a companion memo [4].
52
53
54
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58 Handley, et al. Experimental [Page 1]
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60 RFC 2974 Session Announcement Protocol October 2000
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62
63 2 Terminology
64
65 A SAP announcer periodically multicasts an announcement packet to a
66 well known multicast address and port. The announcement is multicast
67 with the same scope as the session it is announcing, ensuring that
68 the recipients of the announcement are within the scope of the
69 session the announcement describes (bandwidth and other such
70 constraints permitting). This is also important for the scalability
71 of the protocol, as it keeps local session announcements local.
72
73 A SAP listener learns of the multicast scopes it is within (for
74 example, using the Multicast-Scope Zone Announcement Protocol [5])
75 and listens on the well known SAP address and port for those scopes.
76 In this manner, it will eventually learn of all the sessions being
77 announced, allowing those sessions to be joined.
78
79 The key words `MUST', `MUST NOT', `REQUIRED', `SHALL', `SHALL NOT',
80 `SHOULD', `SHOULD NOT', `RECOMMENDED', `MAY', and `OPTIONAL' in this
81 document are to be interpreted as described in [1].
82
83 3 Session Announcement
84
85 As noted previously, a SAP announcer periodically sends an
86 announcement packet to a well known multicast address and port.
87 There is no rendezvous mechanism - the SAP announcer is not aware of
88 the presence or absence of any SAP listeners - and no additional
89 reliability is provided over the standard best-effort UDP/IP
90 semantics.
91
92 That announcement contains a session description and SHOULD contain
93 an authentication header. The session description MAY be encrypted
94 although this is NOT RECOMMENDED (see section 7).
95
96 A SAP announcement is multicast with the same scope as the session it
97 is announcing, ensuring that the recipients of the announcement are
98 within the scope of the session the announcement describes. There are
99 a number of possibilities:
100
101 IPv4 global scope sessions use multicast addresses in the range
102 224.2.128.0 - 224.2.255.255 with SAP announcements being sent to
103 224.2.127.254 (note that 224.2.127.255 is used by the obsolete
104 SAPv0 and MUST NOT be used).
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116 RFC 2974 Session Announcement Protocol October 2000
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118
119 IPv4 administrative scope sessions using administratively scoped IP
120 multicast as defined in [7]. The multicast address to be used for
121 announcements is the highest multicast address in the relevant
122 administrative scope zone. For example, if the scope range is
123 239.16.32.0 - 239.16.33.255, then 239.16.33.255 is used for SAP
124 announcements.
125
126 IPv6 sessions are announced on the address FF0X:0:0:0:0:0:2:7FFE
127 where X is the 4-bit scope value. For example, an announcement
128 for a link-local session assigned the address
129 FF02:0:0:0:0:0:1234:5678, should be advertised on SAP address
130 FF02:0:0:0:0:0:2:7FFE.
131
132 Ensuring that a description is not used by a potential participant
133 outside the session scope is not addressed in this memo.
134
135 SAP announcements MUST be sent on port 9875 and SHOULD be sent with
136 an IP time-to-live of 255 (the use of TTL scoping for multicast is
137 discouraged [7]).
138
139 If a session uses addresses in multiple administrative scope ranges,
140 it is necessary for the announcer to send identical copies of the
141 announcement to each administrative scope range. It is up to the
142 listeners to parse such multiple announcements as the same session
143 (as identified by the SDP origin field, for example). The
144 announcement rate for each administrative scope range MUST be
145 calculated separately, as if the multiple announcements were
146 separate.
147
148 Multiple announcers may announce a single session, as an aid to
149 robustness in the face of packet loss and failure of one or more
150 announcers. The rate at which each announcer repeats its
151 announcement MUST be scaled back such that the total announcement
152 rate is equal to that which a single server would choose.
153 Announcements made in this manner MUST be identical.
154
155 If multiple announcements are being made for a session, then each
156 announcement MUST carry an authentication header signed by the same
157 key, or be treated as a completely separate announcement by
158 listeners.
159
160 An IPv4 SAP listener SHOULD listen on the IPv4 global scope SAP
161 address and on the SAP addresses for each IPv4 administrative scope
162 zone it is within. The discovery of administrative scope zones is
163 outside the scope of this memo, but it is assumed that each SAP
164 listener within a particular scope zone is aware of that scope zone.
165 A SAP listener which supports IPv6 SHOULD also listen to the IPv6 SAP
166 addresses.
167
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174
175 3.1 Announcement Interval
176
177 The time period between repetitions of an announcement is chosen such
178 that the total bandwidth used by all announcements on a single SAP
179 group remains below a preconfigured limit. If not otherwise
180 specified, the bandwidth limit SHOULD be assumed to be 4000 bits per
181 second.
182
183 Each announcer is expected to listen to other announcements in order
184 to determine the total number of sessions being announced on a
185 particular group. Sessions are uniquely identified by the
186 combination of the message identifier hash and originating source
187 fields of the SAP header (note that SAP v0 announcers always set the
188 message identifier hash to zero, and if such an announcement is
189 received the entire message MUST be compared to determine
190 uniqueness).
191
192 Announcements are made by periodic multicast to the group. The base
193 interval between announcements is derived from the number of
194 announcements being made in that group, the size of the announcement
195 and the configured bandwidth limit. The actual transmission time is
196 derived from this base interval as follows:
197
198 1. The announcer initializes the variable tp to be the last time a
199 particular announcement was transmitted (or the current time if
200 this is the first time this announcement is to be made).
201
202 2. Given a configured bandwidth limit in bits/second and an
203 announcement of ad_size bytes, the base announcement interval
204 in seconds is
205
206 interval =max(300; (8*no_of_ads*ad_size)/limit)
207
208 3. An offset is calculated based on the base announcement interval
209
210 offset= rand(interval* 2/3)-(interval/3)
211
212 4. The next transmission time for an announcement derived as
213
214 tn =tp+ interval+ offset
215
216 The announcer then sets a timer to expire at tn and waits. At time
217 tn the announcer SHOULD recalculate the next transmission time. If
218 the new value of tn is before the current time, the announcement is
219 sent immediately. Otherwise the transmission is rescheduled for the
220 new tn. This reconsideration prevents transient packet bursts on
221 startup and when a network partition heals.
222
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230
231 4 Session Deletion
232
233 Sessions may be deleted in one of several ways:
234
235 Explicit Timeout The session description payload may contain
236 timestamp information specifying the start- and end-times of the
237 session. If the current time is later than the end-time of the
238 session, then the session SHOULD be deleted from the receiver's
239 session cache.
240
241 Implicit Timeout A session announcement message should be received
242 periodically for each session description in a receiver's session
243 cache. The announcement period can be predicted by the receiver
244 from the set of sessions currently being announced. If a session
245 announcement message has not been received for ten times the
246 announcement period, or one hour, whichever is the greater, then
247 the session is deleted from the receiver's session cache. The one
248 hour minimum is to allow for transient network partitionings.
249
250 Explicit Deletion A session deletion packet is received specifying
251 the session to be deleted. Session deletion packets SHOULD have a
252 valid authentication header, matching that used to authenticate
253 previous announcement packets. If this authentication is missing,
254 the deletion message SHOULD be ignored.
255
256 5 Session Modification
257
258 A pre-announced session can be modified by simply announcing the
259 modified session description. In this case, the version hash in the
260 SAP header MUST be changed to indicate to receivers that the packet
261 contents should be parsed (or decrypted and parsed if it is
262 encrypted). The session itself, as distinct from the session
263 announcement, is uniquely identified by the payload and not by the
264 message identifier hash in the header.
265
266 The same rules apply for session modification as for session
267 deletion:
268
269 o Either the modified announcement must contain an authentication
270 header signed by the same key as the cached session announcement
271 it is modifying, or:
272
273 o The cached session announcement must not contain an authentication
274 header, and the session modification announcement must originate
275 from the same host as the session it is modifying.
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287 If an announcement is received containing an authentication header
288 and the cached announcement did not contain an authentication header,
289 or it contained a different authentication header, then the modified
290 announcement MUST be treated as a new and different announcement, and
291 displayed in addition to the un-authenticated announcement. The same
292 should happen if a modified packet without an authentication header
293 is received from a different source than the original announcement.
294
295 These rules prevent an announcement having an authentication header
296 added by a malicious user and then being deleted using that header,
297 and it also prevents a denial-of-service attack by someone putting
298 out a spoof announcement which, due to packet loss, reaches some
299 participants before the original announcement. Note that under such
300 circumstances, being able to authenticate the message originator is
301 the only way to discover which session is the correct session.
302
303 0 1 2 3
304 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
305 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
306 | V=1 |A|R|T|E|C| auth len | msg id hash |
307 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
308 | |
309 : originating source (32 or 128 bits) :
310 : :
311 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
312 | optional authentication data |
313 : .... :
314 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
315 | optional payload type |
316 + +-+- - - - - - - - - -+
317 | |0| |
318 + - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - +-+ |
319 | |
320 : payload :
321 | |
322 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
323
324 Figure 1: Packet format
325
326 6 Packet Format
327
328 SAP data packets have the format described in figure 1.
329
330 V: Version Number. The version number field MUST be set to 1 (SAPv2
331 announcements which use only SAPv1 features are backwards
332 compatible, those which use new features can be detected by other
333 means, so the SAP version number doesn't need to change).
334
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343 A: Address type. If the A bit is 0, the originating source field
344 contains a 32-bit IPv4 address. If the A bit is 1, the
345 originating source contains a 128-bit IPv6 address.
346
347 R: Reserved. SAP announcers MUST set this to 0, SAP listeners MUST
348 ignore the contents of this field.
349
350 T: Message Type. If the T field is set to 0 this is a session
351 announcement packet, if 1 this is a session deletion packet.
352
353 E: Encryption Bit. If the encryption bit is set to 1, the payload of
354 the SAP packet is encrypted. If this bit is 0 the packet is not
355 encrypted. See section 7 for details of the encryption process.
356
357 C: Compressed bit. If the compressed bit is set to 1, the payload is
358 compressed using the zlib compression algorithm [3]. If the
359 payload is to be compressed and encrypted, the compression MUST be
360 performed first.
361
362 Authentication Length. An 8 bit unsigned quantity giving the number
363 of 32 bit words following the main SAP header that contain
364 authentication data. If it is zero, no authentication header is
365 present.
366
367 Authentication data containing a digital signature of the packet,
368 with length as specified by the authentication length header
369 field. See section 8 for details of the authentication process.
370
371 Message Identifier Hash. A 16 bit quantity that, used in combination
372 with the originating source, provides a globally unique identifier
373 indicating the precise version of this announcement. The choice
374 of value for this field is not specified here, except that it MUST
375 be unique for each session announced by a particular SAP announcer
376 and it MUST be changed if the session description is modified (and
377 a session deletion message SHOULD be sent for the old version of
378 the session).
379
380 Earlier versions of SAP used a value of zero to mean that the hash
381 should be ignored and the payload should always be parsed. This
382 had the unfortunate side-effect that SAP announcers had to study
383 the payload data to determine how many unique sessions were being
384 advertised, making the calculation of the announcement interval
385 more complex that necessary. In order to decouple the session
386 announcement process from the contents of those announcements, SAP
387 announcers SHOULD NOT set the message identifier hash to zero.
388
389 SAP listeners MAY silently discard messages if the message
390 identifier hash is set to zero.
391
392
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399 Originating Source. This gives the IP address of the original source
400 of the message. This is an IPv4 address if the A field is set to
401 zero, else it is an IPv6 address. The address is stored in
402 network byte order.
403
404 SAPv0 permitted the originating source to be zero if the message
405 identifier hash was also zero. This practise is no longer legal,
406 and SAP announcers SHOULD NOT set the originating source to zero.
407 SAP listeners MAY silently discard packets with the originating
408 source set to zero.
409
410 The header is followed by an optional payload type field and the
411 payload data itself. If the E or C bits are set in the header both
412 the payload type and payload are encrypted and/or compressed.
413
414 The payload type field is a MIME content type specifier, describing
415 the format of the payload. This is a variable length ASCII text
416 string, followed by a single zero byte (ASCII NUL). The payload type
417 SHOULD be included in all packets. If the payload type is
418 `application/sdp' both the payload type and its terminating zero byte
419 MAY be omitted, although this is intended for backwards compatibility
420 with SAP v1 listeners only.
421
422 The absence of a payload type field may be noted since the payload
423 section of such a packet will start with an SDP `v=0' field, which is
424 not a legal MIME content type specifier.
425
426 All implementations MUST support payloads of type `application/sdp'
427 [4]. Other formats MAY be supported although since there is no
428 negotiation in SAP an announcer which chooses to use a session
429 description format other than SDP cannot know that the listeners are
430 able to understand the announcement. A proliferation of payload
431 types in announcements has the potential to lead to severe
432 interoperability problems, and for this reason, the use of non-SDP
433 payloads is NOT RECOMMENDED.
434
435 If the packet is an announcement packet, the payload contains a
436 session description.
437
438 If the packet is a session deletion packet, the payload contains a
439 session deletion message. If the payload format is `application/sdp'
440 the deletion message is a single SDP line consisting of the origin
441 field of the announcement to be deleted.
442
443 It is desirable for the payload to be sufficiently small that SAP
444 packets do not get fragmented by the underlying network.
445 Fragmentation has a loss multiplier effect, which is known to
446 significantly affect the reliability of announcements. It is
447
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454
455 RECOMMENDED that SAP packets are smaller than 1kByte in length,
456 although if it is known that announcements will use a network with a
457 smaller MTU than this, then that SHOULD be used as the maximum
458 recommended packet size.
459
460 7 Encrypted Announcements
461
462 An announcement is received by all listeners in the scope to which it
463 is sent. If an announcement is encrypted, and many of the receivers
464 do not have the encryption key, there is a considerable waste of
465 bandwidth since those receivers cannot use the announcement they have
466 received. For this reason, the use of encrypted SAP announcements is
467 NOT RECOMMENDED on the global scope SAP group or on administrative
468 scope groups which may have many receivers which cannot decrypt those
469 announcements.
470
471 The opinion of the authors is that encrypted SAP is useful in special
472 cases only, and that the vast majority of scenarios where encrypted
473 SAP has been proposed may be better served by distributing session
474 details using another mechanism. There are, however, certain
475 scenarios where encrypted announcements may be useful. For this
476 reason, the encryption bit is included in the SAP header to allow
477 experimentation with encrypted announcements.
478
479 This memo does not specify details of the encryption algorithm to be
480 used or the means by which keys are generated and distributed. An
481 additional specification should define these, if it is desired to use
482 encrypted SAP.
483
484 Note that if an encrypted announcement is being announced via a
485 proxy, then there may be no way for the proxy to discover that the
486 announcement has been superseded, and so it may continue to relay the
487 old announcement in addition to the new announcement. SAP provides
488 no mechanism to chain modified encrypted announcements, so it is
489 advisable to announce the unmodified session as deleted for a short
490 time after the modification has occurred. This does not guarantee
491 that all proxies have deleted the session, and so receivers of
492 encrypted sessions should be prepared to discard old versions of
493 session announcements that they may receive. In most cases however,
494 the only stateful proxy will be local to (and known to) the sender,
495 and an additional (local-area) protocol involving a handshake for
496 such session modifications can be used to avoid this problem.
497
498 Session announcements that are encrypted with a symmetric algorithm
499 may allow a degree of privacy in the announcement of a session, but
500 it should be recognized that a user in possession of such a key can
501 pass it on to other users who should not be in possession of such a
502 key. Thus announcements to such a group of key holders cannot be
503
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511 assumed to have come from an authorized key holder unless there is an
512 appropriate authentication header signed by an authorized key holder.
513 In addition the recipients of such encrypted announcements cannot be
514 assumed to only be authorized key holders. Such encrypted
515 announcements do not provide any real security unless all of the
516 authorized key holders are trusted to maintain security of such
517 session directory keys. This property is shared by the multicast
518 session tools themselves, where it is possible for an un-trustworthy
519 member of the session to pass on encryption keys to un-authorized
520 users. However it is likely that keys used for the session tools
521 will be more short lived than those used for session directories.
522
523 Similar considerations should apply when session announcements are
524 encrypted with an asymmetric algorithm, but then it is possible to
525 restrict the possessor(s) of the private key, so that announcements
526 to a key-holder group can not be made, even if one of the untrusted
527 members of the group proves to be un-trustworthy.
528
529 1 2 3
530 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
531 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
532 | V=1 |P| Auth | |
533 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ |
534 | Format specific authentication subheader |
535 : .................. :
536 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
537
538 Figure 2: Format of the authentication data in the SAP header
539
540 8 Authenticated Announcements
541
542 The authentication header can be used for two purposes:
543
544 o Verification that changes to a session description or deletion of
545 a session are permitted.
546
547 o Authentication of the identity of the session creator.
548
549 In some circumstances only verification is possible because a
550 certificate signed by a mutually trusted person or authority is not
551 available. However, under such circumstances, the session originator
552 may still be authenticated to be the same as the session originator
553 of previous sessions claiming to be from the same person. This may
554 or may not be sufficient depending on the purpose of the session and
555 the people involved.
556
557
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566
567 Clearly the key used for the authentication should not be trusted to
568 belong to the session originator unless it has been separately
569 authenticated by some other means, such as being certified by a
570 trusted third party. Such certificates are not normally included in
571 an SAP header because they take more space than can normally be
572 afforded in an SAP packet, and such verification must therefore take
573 place by some other mechanism. However, as certified public keys are
574 normally locally cached, authentication of a particular key only has
575 to take place once, rather than every time the session directory
576 retransmits the announcement.
577
578 SAP is not tied to any single authentication mechanism.
579 Authentication data in the header is self-describing, but the precise
580 format depends on the authentication mechanism in use. The generic
581 format of the authentication data is given in figure 2. The
582 structure of the format specific authentication subheader, using both
583 the PGP and the CMS formats, is discussed in sections 8.1 and 8.2
584 respectively. Additional formats may be added in future.
585
586 Version Number, V: The version number of the authentication format
587 specified by this memo is 1.
588
589 Padding Bit, P: If necessary the authentication data is padded to be
590 a multiple of 32 bits and the padding bit is set. In this case
591 the last byte of the authentication data contains the number of
592 padding bytes (including the last byte) that must be discarded.
593
594 Authentication Type, Auth: The authentication type is a 4 bit
595 encoded field that denotes the authentication infrastructure the
596 sender expects the recipients to use to check the authenticity and
597 integrity of the information. This defines the format of the
598 authentication subheader and can take the values: 0 = PGP format,
599 1 = CMS format. All other values are undefined and SHOULD be
600 ignored.
601
602 If a SAP packet is to be compressed or encrypted, this MUST be done
603 before the authentication is added.
604
605 The digital signature in the authentication data MUST be calculated
606 over the entire packet, including the header. The authentication
607 length MUST be set to zero and the authentication data excluded when
608 calculating the digital signature.
609
610 It is to be expected that sessions may be announced by a number of
611 different mechanisms, not only SAP. For example, a session
612 description may placed on a web page, sent by email or conveyed in a
613
614
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623 session initiation protocol. To ease interoperability with these
624 other mechanisms, application level security is employed, rather than
625 using IPsec authentication headers.
626
627 8.1 PGP Authentication
628
629 A full description of the PGP protocol can be found in [2]. When
630 using PGP for SAP authentication the basic format specific
631 authentication subheader comprises a digital signature packet as
632 described in [2]. The signature type MUST be 0x01 which means the
633 signature is that of a canonical text document.
634
635 8.2 CMS Authentication
636
637 A full description of the Cryptographic Message Syntax can be found
638 in [6]. The format specific authentication subheader will, in the
639 CMS case, have an ASN.1 ContentInfo type with the ContentType being
640 signedData.
641
642 Use is made of the option available in PKCS#7 to leave the content
643 itself blank as the content which is signed is already present in the
644 packet. Inclusion of it within the SignedData type would duplicate
645 this data and increase the packet length unnecessarily. In addition
646 this allows recipients with either no interest in the authentication,
647 or with no mechanism for checking it, to more easily skip the
648 authentication information.
649
650 There SHOULD be only one signerInfo and related fields corresponding
651 to the originator of the SAP announcement. The signingTime SHOULD be
652 present as a signedAttribute. However, due to the strict size
653 limitations on the size of SAP packets, certificates and CRLs SHOULD
654 NOT be included in the signedData structure. It is expected that
655 users of the protocol will have other methods for certificate and CRL
656 distribution.
657
658 9 Scalability and caching
659
660 SAP is intended to announce the existence of long-lived wide-area
661 multicast sessions. It is not an especially timely protocol:
662 sessions are announced by periodic multicast with a repeat rate on
663 the order of tens of minutes, and no enhanced reliability over UDP.
664 This leads to a long startup delay before a complete set of
665 announcements is heard by a listener. This delay is clearly
666 undesirable for interactive browsing of announced sessions.
667
668 In order to reduce the delays inherent in SAP, it is recommended that
669 proxy caches are deployed. A SAP proxy cache is expected to listen
670 to all SAP groups in its scope, and to maintain an up-to-date list of
671
672
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678
679 all announced sessions along with the time each announcement was last
680 received. When a new SAP listeners starts, it should contact its
681 local proxy to download this information, which is then sufficient
682 for it to process future announcements directly, as if it has been
683 continually listening.
684
685 The protocol by which a SAP listener contacts its local proxy cache
686 is not specified here.
687
688 10 Security Considerations
689
690 SAP contains mechanisms for ensuring integrity of session
691 announcements, for authenticating the origin of an announcement and
692 for encrypting such announcements (sections 7 and 8).
693
694 As stated in section 5, if a session modification announcement is
695 received that contains a valid authentication header, but which is
696 not signed by the original creator of the session, then the session
697 must be treated as a new session in addition to the original session
698 with the same SDP origin information unless the originator of one of
699 the session descriptions can be authenticated using a certificate
700 signed by a trusted third party. If this were not done, there would
701 be a possible denial of service attack whereby a party listens for
702 new announcements, strips off the original authentication header,
703 modifies the session description, adds a new authentication header
704 and re-announces the session. If a rule was imposed that such spoof
705 announcements were ignored, then if packet loss or late starting of a
706 session directory instance caused the original announcement to fail
707 to arrive at a site, but the spoof announcement did so, this would
708 then prevent the original announcement from being accepted at that
709 site.
710
711 A similar denial-of-service attack is possible if a session
712 announcement receiver relies completely on the originating source and
713 hash fields to indicate change, and fails to parse the remainder of
714 announcements for which it has seen the origin/hash combination
715 before.
716
717 A denial of service attack is possible from a malicious site close to
718 a legitimate site which is making a session announcement. This can
719 happen if the malicious site floods the legitimate site with huge
720 numbers of (illegal) low TTL announcements describing high TTL
721 sessions. This may reduce the session announcement rate of the
722 legitimate announcement to below a tenth of the rate expected at
723 remote sites and therefore cause the session to time out. Such an
724 attack is likely to be easily detectable, and we do not provide any
725 mechanism here to prevent it.
726
727
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729
730 Handley, et al. Experimental [Page 13]
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732 RFC 2974 Session Announcement Protocol October 2000
733
734
735 A. Summary of differences between SAPv0 and SAPv1
736
737 For this purpose SAPv0 is defined as the protocol in use by version
738 2.2 of the session directory tool, sdr. SAPv1 is the protocol
739 described in the 19 November 1996 version of this memo. The packet
740 headers of SAP messages are the same in V0 and V1 in that a V1 tool
741 can parse a V0 announcement header but not vice-versa. In SAPv0, the
742 fields have the following values:
743
744 o Version Number: 0
745
746 o Message Type: 0 (Announcement)
747
748 o Authentication Type: 0 (No Authentication)
749
750 o Encryption Bit: 0 (No Encryption)
751
752 o Compression Bit: 0 (No compression)
753
754 o Message Id Hash: 0 (No Hash Specified)
755
756 o Originating Source: 0 (No source specified, announcement has
757 not been relayed)
758
759 B. Summary of differences between SAPv1 and SAPv2
760
761 The packet headers of SAP messages are the same in V1 and V2 in that
762 a V2 tool can parse a V1 announcement header but not necessarily
763 vice-versa.
764
765 o The A bit has been added to the SAP header, replacing one of the
766 bits of the SAPv1 message type field. If set to zero the
767 announcement is of an IPv4 session, and the packet is backwards
768 compatible with SAPv1. If set to one the announcement is of an
769 IPv6 session, and SAPv1 listeners (which do not support IPv6) will
770 see this as an illegal message type (MT) field.
771
772 o The second bit of the message type field in SAPv1 has been
773 replaced by a reserved, must-be-zero, bit. This bit was unused in
774 SAPv1, so this change just codifies existing usage.
775
776 o SAPv1 specified encryption of the payload. SAPv2 includes the E
777 bit in the SAP header to indicate that the payload is encrypted,
778 but does not specify any details of the encryption.
779
780 o SAPv1 allowed the message identifier hash and originating source
781 fields to be set to zero, for backwards compatibility. This is no
782 longer legal.
783
784
785
786 Handley, et al. Experimental [Page 14]
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788 RFC 2974 Session Announcement Protocol October 2000
789
790
791 o SAPv1 specified gzip compression. SAPv2 uses zlib (the only known
792 implementation of SAP compression used zlib, and gzip compression
793 was a mistake).
794
795 o SAPv2 provides a more complete specification for authentication.
796
797 o SAPv2 allows for non-SDP payloads to be transported. SAPv1
798 required that the payload was SDP.
799
800 o SAPv1 included a timeout field for encrypted announcement, SAPv2
801 does not (and relies of explicit deletion messages or implicit
802 timeouts).
803
804 C. Acknowledgements
805
806 SAP and SDP were originally based on the protocol used by the sd
807 session directory from Van Jacobson at LBNL. Version 1 of SAP was
808 designed by Mark Handley as part of the European Commission MICE
809 (Esprit 7602) and MERCI (Telematics 1007) projects. Version 2
810 includes authentication features developed by Edmund Whelan, Goli
811 Montasser-Kohsari and Peter Kirstein as part of the European
812 Commission ICE-TEL project (Telematics 1005), and support for IPv6
813 developed by Maryann P. Maher and Colin Perkins.
814
815
816
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818
819
820
821
822
823
824
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842 Handley, et al. Experimental [Page 15]
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844 RFC 2974 Session Announcement Protocol October 2000
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846
847 D. Authors' Addresses
848
849 Mark Handley
850 AT&T Center for Internet Research at ICSI,
851 International Computer Science Institute,
852 1947 Center Street, Suite 600,
853 Berkeley, CA 94704, USA
854
855 EMail: mjh@aciri.org
856
857
858 Colin Perkins
859 USC Information Sciences Institute
860 4350 N. Fairfax Drive, Suite 620
861 Arlington, VA 22203, USA
862
863 EMail: csp@isi.edu
864
865
866 Edmund Whelan
867 Department of Computer Science,
868 University College London,
869 Gower Street,
870 London, WC1E 6BT, UK
871
872 EMail: e.whelan@cs.ucl.ac.uk
873
874
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876
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898 Handley, et al. Experimental [Page 16]
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900 RFC 2974 Session Announcement Protocol October 2000
901
902
903 References
904
905 [1] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to indicate requirement
906 levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
907
908 [2] Callas, J., Donnerhacke, L., Finney, H. and R. Thayer. "OpenPGP
909 message format", RFC 2440, November 1998.
910
911 [3] Deutsch, P. and J.-L. Gailly, "Zlib compressed data format
912 specification version 3.3", RFC 1950, May 1996.
913
914 [4] Handley, M. and V. Jacobson, "SDP: Session Description Protocol",
915 RFC 2327, April 1998.
916
917 [5] Handley, M., Thaler, D. and R. Kermode, "Multicast-scope zone
918 announcement protocol (MZAP)", RFC 2776, February 2000.
919
920 [6] Housley, R., "Cryptographic message syntax", RFC 2630, June 1999.
921
922 [7] Mayer, D., "Administratively scoped IP multicast", RFC 2365, July
923 1998.
924
925
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956 RFC 2974 Session Announcement Protocol October 2000
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958
959 Full Copyright Statement
960
961 Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000). All Rights Reserved.
962
963 This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
964 others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
965 or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
966 and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any
967 kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
968 included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this
969 document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
970 the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
971 Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of
972 developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for
973 copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be
974 followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than
975 English.
976
977 The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
978 revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.
979
980 This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
981 "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING
982 TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING
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985 MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
986
987 Acknowledgement
988
989 Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
990 Internet Society.
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