2.8.1 Behavior Engineering for Hindrance Avoidance (behave)

NOTE: This charter is a snapshot of the 66th IETF Meeting in Montreal, Quebec Canada. It may now be out-of-date.

Last Modified: 2006-07-11

Chair(s):

Dan Wing <dwing@cisco.com>

Transport Area Director(s):

Magnus Westerlund <magnus.westerlund@ericsson.com>
Lars Eggert <lars.eggert@netlab.nec.de>

Transport Area Advisor:

Magnus Westerlund <magnus.westerlund@ericsson.com>

Mailing Lists:

General Discussion: ietf-behave@list.sipfoundry.org
To Subscribe: ietf-behave-request@list.sipfoundry.org
In Body: with subscribe in body
Archive: http://list.sipfoundry.org/archive/ietf-behave

Description of Working Group:

Given the current near-universal deployment of NATs (Network Address
Translators) in the public Internet, the lack of standards for NAT
behavior has given rise to a crisis. While it is widely acknowledged
that NATs create problems for numerous Internet applications, our
inability to describe precisely what a NAT is or how it behaves leaves
us few solutions for compensating for the presence of NATs.

The behavior of NATs varies dramatically from one implementation to
another. As a result it is very difficult for applications to predict
or discover the behavior of these devices. Predicting and/or
discovering the behavior of NATs is important for designing
application protocols and NAT traversal techniques that work reliably
in existing networks. This situation is especially problematic for end-
to-end interactive applications such as multiuser games and
interactive multimedia.

NATs continue to proliferate and have seen an increasing rate of
deployment. IPv6 deployments can eliminate this problem, but there is
a significant interim period in which applications will need to work
both in IPv4 NAT environments and with the IPv6 to IPv4 transition
mechanisms.

This working group proposes to generate requirements documents and best
current practices to enable NATs to function in as deterministic a
fashion as possible. It will consider what is broken by these devices
and document approaches for characterizing and testing them. The NAT
behavior practices will be application independent.

The group will also advise on how to develop applications that
discover and reliably function in environments with NATs that follow
the best current practices identified by this working group. This will
include the development of protocol-independent toolkits usable by
application protocols for NAT traversal. This will include a revision
of RFC 3489 for NAT binding discovery and a relay protocol that
focuses on security.

The work will be done with the goal of encouraging eventual migration
to IPv6 and compliance with the UNSAF [RFC 3424] considerations. It
will not encourage the proliferation of NATs.

The behavior that will be considered includes IP fragmentation and
parameters that impact ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP, MLD, and multicast. The
proposed WG will coordinate with v6ops, midcom and nsis. The work is
largely limited to examining various approaches that are already in
use today and providing suggestions about which ones are likely to
work best in the internet architecture.

Goals and Milestones:

Done  Submit BCP that defines unicast UDP behavioral requirements for NATs to IESG
Aug 2006  Submit revision of RFC 3489 to IESG
Sep 2006  Submit BCP that defines multicast UDP behavioral requirements for NATs to IESG
Oct 2006  Submit relay protocol to IESG
Oct 2006  Submit IPv6 relay protocol to IESG
Dec 2006  Submit a BCP that discusses protocol design techniques for using the existing set of NAT traversal approaches to IESG
Mar 2007  Submit a BCP that defines TCP behavioral requirements for NATs to IESG
Mar 2007  Submit a BCP that defines ICMP behavioral requirements for NATs to IESG
Apr 2007  Close WG or recharter

Internet-Drafts:

  • draft-ietf-behave-rfc3489bis-05.txt
  • draft-ietf-behave-nat-udp-08.txt
  • draft-ietf-behave-multicast-04.txt
  • draft-ietf-behave-tcp-01.txt
  • draft-ietf-behave-turn-02.txt
  • draft-ietf-behave-nat-icmp-01.txt
  • draft-ietf-behave-p2p-state-00.txt

    No Request For Comments

    Meeting Minutes


    Slides

    BEHAVE Agenda
    RFC3489bis
    NAT Behavioral Requirements for TCP
    TURN -01 -- Changes and Issues
    NAT Diagnostics