rfc2775.txt

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Network Working Group                                      B. Carpenter
Request for Comments: 2775                                          IBM
Category: Informational                                   February 2000


                         Internet Transparency

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
   not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
   memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

   This document describes the current state of the Internet from the
   architectural viewpoint, concentrating on issues of end-to-end
   connectivity and transparency. It concludes with a summary of some
   major architectural alternatives facing the Internet network layer.

   This document was used as input to the IAB workshop on the future of
   the network layer held in July 1999. For this reason, it does not
   claim to be complete and definitive, and it refrains from making
   recommendations.

Table of Contents

   1. Introduction.................................................2
   2. Aspects of end-to-end connectivity...........................3
   2.1 The end-to-end argument.....................................3
   2.2 End-to-end performance......................................4
   2.3 End-to-end address transparency.............................4
   3. Multiple causes of loss of transparency......................5
   3.1 The Intranet model..........................................6
   3.2 Dynamic address allocation..................................6
   3.2.1 SLIP and PPP..............................................6
   3.2.2 DHCP......................................................6
   3.3 Firewalls...................................................6
   3.3.1 Basic firewalls...........................................6
   3.3.2 SOCKS.....................................................7
   3.4 Private addresses...........................................7
   3.5 Network address translators.................................7
   3.6 Application level gateways, relays, proxies, and caches.....8
   3.7 Voluntary isolation and peer networks.......................8



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   3.8 Split DNS...................................................9
   3.9 Various load-sharing tricks.................................9
   4. Summary of current status and impact.........................9
   5. Possible future directions..................................11
   5.1 Successful migration to IPv6...............................11
   5.2 Complete failure of IPv6...................................12
   5.2.1 Re-allocating the IPv4 address space.....................12
   5.2.2 Exhaustion...............................................13
   5.3 Partial deployment of IPv6.................................13
   6. Conclusion..................................................13
   7. Security Considerations.....................................13
   Acknowledgements...............................................14
   References.....................................................14
   Author's Address...............................................17
   Full Copyright Statement.......................................18

1. Introduction

      "There's a freedom about the Internet: As long as we accept the
       rules of sending packets around, we can send packets containing
       anything to anywhere." [Berners-Lee]

   The Internet is experiencing growing pains which are often referred
   to as "the end-to-end problem". This document attempts to analyse
   those growing pains by reviewing the current state of the network
   layer, especially its progressive loss of transparency. For the
   purposes of this document, "transparency" refers to the original
   Internet concept of a single universal logical addressing scheme, and
   the mechanisms by which packets may flow from source to destination
   essentially unaltered.

   The causes of this loss of transparency are partly artefacts of
   parsimonious allocation of the limited address space available to
   IPv4, and partly the result of broader issues resulting from the
   widespread use of TCP/IP technology by businesses and consumers. For
   example, network address translation is an artefact, but Intranets
   are not.

   Thus the way forward must recognise the fundamental changes in the
   usage of TCP/IP that are driving current Internet growth. In one
   scenario, a complete migration to IPv6 potentially allows the
   restoration of global address transparency, but without removing
   firewalls and proxies from the picture. At the other extreme, a total
   failure of IPv6 leads to complete fragmentation of the network layer,
   with global connectivity depending on endless patchwork.






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   This document does not discuss the routing implications of address
   space, nor the implications of quality of service management on
   router state, although both these matters interact with transparency
   to some extent. It also does not substantively discuss namespace
   issues.

2. Aspects of end-to-end connectivity

   The phrase "end to end", often abbreviated as "e2e", is widely used
   in architectural discussions of the Internet. For the purposes of
   this paper, we first present three distinct aspects of end-to-
   endness.

2.1 The end-to-end argument

   This is an argument first described in [Saltzer] and reviewed in [RFC
   1958], from which an extended quotation follows:

      "The basic argument is that, as a first principle, certain
      required end-to-end functions can only be performed correctly by
      the end-systems themselves. A specific case is that any network,
      however carefully designed, will be subject to failures of
      transmission at some statistically determined rate. The best way
      to cope with this is to accept it, and give responsibility for the
      integrity of communication to the end systems. Another specific
      case is end-to-end security.

      "To quote from [Saltzer], 'The function in question can completely
      and correctly be implemented only with the knowledge and help of
      the application standing at the endpoints of the communication
      system.  Therefore, providing that questioned function as a
      feature of the communication system itself is not possible.
      (Sometimes an incomplete version of the function provided by the
      communication system may be useful as a performance enhancement.)'

      "This principle has important consequences if we require
      applications to survive partial network failures. An end-to-end
      protocol design should not rely on the maintenance of state (i.e.
      information about the state of the end-to-end communication)
      inside the network. Such state should be maintained only in the
      endpoints, in such a way that the state can only be destroyed when
      the endpoint itself breaks (known as fate-sharing). An immediate
      consequence of this is that datagrams are better than classical
      virtual circuits.  The network's job is to transmit datagrams as
      efficiently and flexibly as possible.  Everything else should be
      done at the fringes."





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   Thus this first aspect of end-to-endness limits what the network is
   expected to do, and clarifies what the end-system is expected to do.
   The end-to-end argument underlies the rest of this document.

2.2 End-to-end performance

   Another aspect, in which the behaviour of the network and that of the
   end-systems interact in a complex way, is performance, in a
   generalised sense. This is not a primary focus of the present
   document, but it is mentioned briefly since it is often referred to
   when discussing end-to-end issues.

   Much work has been done over many years to improve and optimise the
   performance of TCP. Interestingly, this has led to comparatively
   minor changes to TCP itself; [STD 7] is still valid apart from minor
   additions [RFC 1323, RFC 2581, RFC 2018]. However a great deal of
   knowledge about good practice in TCP implementations has built up,
   and the queuing and discard mechanisms in routers have been fine-
   tuned to improve system performance in congested conditions.

   Unfortunately all this experience in TCP performance does not help
   with transport protocols that do not exhibit TCP-like response to
   congestion [RFC 2309]. Also, the requirement for specified quality of
   service for different applications and/or customers has led to much
   new development, especially the Integrated Services [RFC 1633, RFC
   2210] and Differentiated Services [RFC 2475] models. At the same time
   new transport-related protocols have appeared [RFC 1889, RFC 2326] or
   are in discussion in the IETF. It should also be noted that since the
   speed of light is not set by an IETF standard, our current notions of
   end-to-end performance will be largely irrelevant to interplanetary
   networking.

   Thus, despite the fact that performance and congestion issues for TCP
   are now quite well understood, the arrival of QOS mechanisms and of
   new transport protocols raise new questions about end-to-end
   performance, but these are not further discussed here.

2.3 End-to-end address transparency

   When the catenet concept (a network of networks) was first described
   by Cerf in 1978 [IEN 48] following an earlier suggestion by Pouzin in
   1974 [CATENET], a clear assumption was that a single logical address
   space would cover the whole catenet (or Internet as we now know it).
   This applied not only to the early TCP/IP Internet, but also to the
   Xerox PUP design, the OSI connectionless network design, XNS, and
   numerous other proprietary network architectures.





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   This concept had two clear consequences - packets could flow
   essentially unaltered throughout the network, and their source and
   destination addresses could be used as unique labels for the end
   systems.

   The first of these consequences is not absolute.  In practice changes
   can be made to packets in transit. Some of these are reversible at
   the destination (such as fragmentation and compression). Others may
   be irreversible (such as changing type of service bits or
   decrementing a hop limit), but do not seriously obstruct the end-to-
   end principle of Section 2.1. However, any change made to a packet in
   transit that requires per-flow state information to be kept at an
   intermediate point would violate the fate-sharing aspect of the end-
   to-end principle.

   The second consequence, using addresses as unique labels, was in a
   sense a side-effect of the catenet concept. However, it was a side-
   effect that came to be highly significant. The uniqueness and
   durability of addresses have been exploited in many ways, in
   particular by incorporating them in transport identifiers.  Thus they
   have been built into transport checksums, cryptographic signatures,
   Web documents, and proprietary software licence servers. [RFC 2101]
   explores this topic in some detail. Its main conclusion is that IPv4
   addresses can no longer be assumed to be either globally unique or
   invariant, and any protocol or applications design that assumes these
   properties will fail unpredictably. Work in the IAB and the NAT
   working group [NAT-ARCH] has analysed the impact of one specific
   cause of non-uniqueness and non-invariance, i.e., network address
   translators. Again the conclusion is that many applications will
   fail, unless they are specifically adapted to avoid the assumption of
   address transparency. One form of adaptation is the insertion of some
   form of application level gateway, and another form is for the NAT to
   modify payloads on the fly, but in either case the adaptation is
   application-specific.

   Non-transparency of addresses is part of a more general phenomenon.
   We have to recognise that the Internet has lost end-to-end
   transparency, and this requires further analysis.

3. Multiple causes of loss of transparency

   This section describes various recent inventions that have led to the
   loss of end-to-end transparency in the Internet.








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3.1 The Intranet model

   Underlying a number of the specific developments mentioned below is
   the concept of an "Intranet", loosely defined as a private corporate
   network using TCP/IP technology, and connected to the Internet at
   large in a carefully controlled manner. The Intranet is presumed to
   be used by corporate employees for business purposes, and to
   interconnect hosts that carry sensitive or confidential information.
   It is also held to a higher standard of operational availability than
   the Internet at large. Its usage can be monitored and controlled, and
   its resources can be better planned and tuned than those of the
   public network. These arguments of security and resource management
   have ensured the dominance of the Intranet model in most corporations
   and campuses.

   The emergence of the Intranet model has had a profound effect on the
   notion of application transparency. Many corporate network managers
   feel it is for them alone to determine which applications can
   traverse the Internet/Intranet boundary. In this world view, address
   transparency may seem to be an unimportant consideration.

3.2 Dynamic address allocation

3.2.1 SLIP and PPP

   It is to be noted that with the advent of vast numbers of dial-up
   Internet users, whose addresses are allocated at dial-up time, and
   whose traffic may be tunneled back to their home ISP, the actual IP
   addresses of such users are purely transient. During their period of
   validity they can be relied on end-to-end, but they must be forgotten
   at the end of every session. In particular they can have no permanent
   association with the domain name of the host borrowing them.

3.2.2 DHCP

   Similarly, LAN-based users of the Internet today frequently use DHCP
   to acquire a new address at system restart, so here again the actual
   value of the address is potentially transient and must not be stored
   between sessions.

3.3 Firewalls

3.3.1 Basic firewalls

   Intranet managers have a major concern about security: unauthorised
   traffic must be kept out of the Intranet at all costs. This concern
   led directly to the firewall concept (a system that intercepts all
   traffic between the Internet and the Intranet, and only lets through



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