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Network Working Group A. Kirkham
Internet-Draft Cisco Systems
Obsoletes: None (if approved) June 16, 2011
Intended status: Informational
Expires: December 18, 2011
Issues with Private IP Addressing in the Internet
draft-kirkham-private-ip-sp-cores-04
Abstract
The purpose of this document is to provide a discussion of the
potential problems of using private, RFC1918, or non-globally-
routable addressing within the core of an SP network. The discussion
focuses on link addresses and to a small extent loopback addresses.
While many of the issues are well recognised within the ISP
community, there appears to be no document that collectively
describes the issues.
Legal
This documents and the information contained therein are provided on
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This Internet-Draft will expire on December 18, 2011.
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2011 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Conservation of Address Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Effects on Traceroute . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Effects on Path MTU Discovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
5. Unexpected interactions with some NAT implementations . . . . 7
6. Interactions with edge anti-spoofing techniques . . . . . . . 9
7. Peering using loopbacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
8. DNS Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
9. Operational and Troubleshooting issues . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
10. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
11. Alternate approaches to core network security . . . . . . . . 11
12. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Appendix A. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
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1. Introduction
In the mid to late 90's, some Internet Service Providers (ISPs)
adopted the practice of utilising private (or non-globally unique) IP
(i.e. RFC1918) addresses for the infrastructure links and in some
cases the loopback interfaces within their networks. The reasons for
this approach centered on conservation of address space (i.e.
scarcity of public IPv4 address space), and security of the core
network (also known as core hiding).
However, a number of technical and operational issues occurred as a
result of using private (or non-globally unique) IP addresses, and
virtually all these ISPs moved away from the practice. Tier 1 ISPs
are considered the benchmark of the industry and as of the time of
writing, there is no known tier 1 ISP that utilises the practice of
private addressing within their core network.
The following sections will discuss the various issues associated
with deploying private IP (i.e. RFC1918) addresses within ISP core
networks.
The intent of this document is not to suggest that private IP can not
be used with the core of an SP network as some providers use this
practice and operate successfully. The intent is to outline the
potential issues or effects of such a practice.
Note: The practice of ISPs using 'stolen' address space has many of
the same issues (or effects) as that of using private IP address
space within core networks. The term "stolen IP address space"
refers to the practice of an ISP using address space for its own
infrastructure/core network addressing that has been officially
allocated by an RIR to another provider, but that provider is not
currently using or advertising within the Internet. Stolen
addressing is not discussed further in this document. It is simply
noted as an associated issue.
2. Conservation of Address Space
One of the original intents for the use of private IP addressing
within an ISP core was the conservation of IP address space. When an
ISP is allocated a block of public IP addresses (from a RIR), this
address block was traditionally split in order to dedicate some
portion for infrastructure use (i.e. for the core network), and the
other portion for customer (subscriber) or other address pool use.
Typically, the number of infrastructure addresses needed is
relatively small in comparison to the total address count. So unless
the ISP was only granted a small public block, dedicating some
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portion to infrastructure links and loopback addresses (/32) is
rarely a large enough issue to outweigh the problems that are
potentially caused when private address space is used.
Additionally, specifications and equipment capability improvements
now allow for the use of /31 subnets [RFC3021] for link addresses in
place of the original /30 subnets - further minimising the impact of
dedicating public addresses to infrastructure links by only using two
(2) IP addresses per point to point link versus four (4)
respectively.
The use of private addressing as a conservation technique within an
Internet Service Provider (ISP) core can cause a number of technical
and operational issues or effects. The main effects are described
below.
3. Effects on Traceroute
The single biggest effect caused by the use of private (RFC1918)
addressing within an Internet core is the fact that it can disrupt
the operation of traceroute in some situations. This section
provides some examples of the issues that can occur.
A first example illustrates the situation where the traceroute
crosses an AS boundary and one of the networks has utilised private
addressing. The following simple network is used to show the
effects.
AS100 EBGP AS200
IBGP Mesh <---------------> IBGP Mesh
Pool - Pool -
1.1.2.0/24 2.1.2.0/24
2.1.1.8/30
10.1.1.0/30 10.1.1.4/30 .9 .10 2.1.1.4/30 2.1.1.0/30
.1 .2 .5 .6 ------------ .6 .5 .2 .1
R1-----------R2-----------R3--| |--R4----------R5----------R6
10.1.1.101 10.1.1.102 10.1.1.103 2.1.1.103 2.1.1.102 2.1.1.101
Loopback Addresses shown at the bottom.
Using this example, performing the traceroute from AS200 to AS100, we
can see the private addresses of the infrastructure links in AS100
are returned.
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R6#traceroute 1.1.2.1
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 1.1.2.1
1 2.1.1.2 40 msec 20 msec 32 msec
2 2.1.1.6 16 msec 20 msec 20 msec
3 2.1.1.9 20 msec 20 msec 32 msec
4 10.1.1.5 20 msec 20 msec 20 msec
5 10.1.1.1 20 msec 20 msec 20 msec
R6#
This effect in itself is often not a problem. However, if anti-
spoofing controls are applied at network perimeters, then responses
returned from hops with private IP addresses will be dropped. The
effects are illustrated in a second example below. The same network
as example 1 is used, but with the addition of anti-spoofing deployed
at the ingress of R4 on the R3-R4 interface (ip address 2.1.1.10).
R6#traceroute 1.1.2.1
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 150.1.2.1
1 2.1.1.2 24 msec 20 msec 20 msec
2 2.1.1.6 20 msec 52 msec 44 msec
3 2.1.1.9 44 msec 20 msec 32 msec
4 * * *
5 * * *
6 * * *
7 * * *
8 * * *
9 * * *
10 * * *
11 * * *
12 * * *
In a third example, a similar effect is caused. If the source IP
address of the traceroute is within a privately numbered part of the
network (AS100) and the destination is outside of the ISPs AS
(AS200). In this situation the traceroute will fail completely
beyond the AS boundary.
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R1# traceroute 2.1.2.1
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 2.1.2.1
1 10.1.1.2 20 msec 20 msec 20 msec
2 10.1.1.6 52 msec 24 msec 40 msec
3 * * *
4 * * *
5 * * *
6 * * *
R1#
While it is completely unreasonable to expect a packet with a private
source address to be successfully returned in a typical SP
environment, the case is included to show the effect as it can have
implications for troubleshooting. This case will be referenced in a
later section.
In a complex topology, with multiple paths and exit points, the
provider will lose their ability to trace paths originating within
thier own AS, through their network, to destinations within other
ASs. Such a situation could be a severe troubleshooting impediment.
It should be noted that some solutions to this problem have been
proposed in RFC 5837 which provides extensions to ICMP to allow the
identification of interfaces and their components by any combination
of the following: ifIndex, IPv4 address, IPv6 address, name, and
MTU. However at the time of writing, little or no deployment was
known to be in place.
4. Effects on Path MTU Discovery
The Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) process was designed to allow hosts to
make an accurate assessment of the maximum packet size that can be
sent across a path without fragmentation. Path MTU Discovery is
supported for TCP (and other protocols that support PMTUD such as GRE
and IPsec) and works as follows:
o When a router attempts to forward an IP datagram with the Do Not
Fragment (DF) bit set out a link that has a lower MTU than the size
of the packet, the router MUST drop the packet and return an Internet
Control Message Protocol (ICMP) 'destination unreachable -
fragmentation needed and DF set (type 3, code 4)' message to the
source of the IP datagram. This message includes the MTU of that
next-hop network. As a result, the source station which receives the
ICMP message, will lower the send Maximum Segment Size (MSS).
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It is obviously desirable that packets be sent between two
communicating hosts without fragmentation as this process imposes
extra load on the fragmenting router (process of fragmentation),
intermediate routers (forwarding additional packets), as well as the
receiving host (reassembly of the fragmented packets). Additionally,
many applications, including some web servers, set the DF (do not
fragment) bit causing undesirable interactions if the path MTU is
insufficient. Other TCP implementations may set an MTU size of 576
bytes if PMTUD is unavailable. In addition, IPsec and other
tunneling protocols will often require MTUs greater than 1500 bytes
and often rely on PMTUD.
While it is uncommon these days for core SP networks not to support
path MTUs in excess of 1500 bytes (with 4470 or greater being
common), the situation of 1500 byte path MTUs is still common in many
ethernet edge or aggregation networks.
The issue is as follows:
o When an ICMP Type 3 Code 4 message is issued from an infrastructure
link that uses a private (RFC1918) address, it must be routed back to
the originating host. As the originating host will typically be a
globally routable IP address, its source address is used as the
destination address of the returned ICMP Type 3 packet. At this
point there are normally no problems.
o As the returned packet will have an RFC1918 source address,
problems can occur when the returned packet passes through an anti-
spoofing security control (such as Unicast RPF (uRPF)), other anti-
spoofing ACLs, or virtually any perimeter firewall. These devices
will typically drop packets with an RFC1918 source address, breaking
the successful operation of PMTUD.
As a result, the potential for application level issues may be
created.
5. Unexpected interactions with some NAT implementations
Private addressing is legitimately used within many enterprise,
corporate or government networks for internal network addressing.
When users on the inside of the network require Internet access, they
will typically connect through a perimeter router, firewall, or
network proxy, that provides Network Address Translation (NAT) or
Network Address Port Translation (NAPT) services to a public
interface.
Unpredictable or confusing interactions could occur if traffic such
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as traceroute, PMTUD and possibly other applications were launched
from the NAT IPv4 'inside address' and it passed over the same
address range in the public IP core. While such a situation would be
unlikely to occur if the NAT pools and the private infrastructure
addressing were under the same administration, such a situation could
occur in the more typical situation of a NAT'ed corporate network
connecting to an ISP. For example, say if 10.1.1.0/24 is used to
internally number the corporate network. A traceroute or PMTUD
request is initiated inside the corporate network from say 10.1.1.1.
The packet passes through a NAT (or NAPT) gateway, then over an ISP
core numbered from the same range. When the responses are delivered
back to the originator, the returned packets from the privately
addressed part of the ISP core could have an identical source and
destination address of 10.1.1.1.
NAT Pool -
3.1.1.0/24
10.1.1.0/30 2.1.1.12/30 10.1.1.0/30 2.1.1.4/30 2.1.1.0/30
.1 .2 .14 .13 .1 .2 .6 .5 .2 .1
R1-----------R2-----------R3---------------R4----------R5----------R6
NAT
10.1.1.100 2.1.1.104 2.1.1.103 2.1.1.102 2.1.1.101 2.1.1.100
Loopback Addresses shown at the bottom.
R1#traceroute 160.1.1.100
Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 160.1.1.100
1 10.1.1.2 0 msec 0 msec 0 msec
2 2.1.1.13 0 msec 4 msec 0 msec
3 10.1.1.2 0 msec 4 msec 0 msec <<<<
4 2.1.1.5 4 msec 0 msec 4 msec
5 2.1.1.1 0 msec 0 msec 0 msec
R1#
This example has been included to illustrate an effect. Whether that
effect would be problematic would depend on both the deployment
scenario and the application in use.
Further complications may arise during the transition to IPv6.
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Scarcity of public IPv4 addresses is forcing many service providers
to make use of NAT. CGN (Carrier Grade NAT) will enables service
providers to assign private RFC 1918 IPv4 addresses to their
customers rather than public, globally unique IPv4 addresses. NAT444
will make use of a double NAT process. Minimally, care will need to
be taken where these transition schemes are used in conjunction with
private RFC1918 infrastructure addressing.
6. Interactions with edge anti-spoofing techniques
Denial of service attacks and distributed denial of attacks can make
use of spoofed source IP addresses in an attempt to obfuscate the
source of an attack. RFC2827 (Network Ingress Filtering) strongly
recommends that providers of Internet connectivity implement
filtering to prevent packets using source addresses outside of their
legitimately assigned and advertised prefix ranges. Such filtering
should also prevent packets with private source addresses from
egressing the AS.
Best security practices for ISPs also strongly recommend that packets
with illegitimate source addresses should be dropped at the AS
perimeter. Illegitimate source addresses includes private IP
(RFC1918) addresses, addresses within the provider's assigned prefix
ranges, and bogons (legitimate but unassigned IP addresses).
Additionally, packets with private IP destination addresses should
also be dropped at the AS perimeter.
If such filtering is properly deployed, then traffic either sourced
from, or destined for privately addressed portions of the network
should be dropped. Hence the negative consequences on traceroute,
PMTUD and regular ping type traffic.
7. Peering using loopbacks
Although not a common technique, some ISPs use the loopback addresses
of border routers (ASBRs) for peering, in particular where multiple
connections or exchange points exist between the two ISPs. Such a
technique is used by some ISPs as the foundation of fine grained
traffic engineering and load balancing through the combination of IGP
metrics and multi-hop BGP. When private or non-globally reachable
addresses are used as loopback addresses, this technique is either
not possible, or considerably more complex to implement.
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8. DNS Interaction
Many ISPs utilise their DNS to perform both forward and reverse
resolution for the infrastructure devices and infrastructure
addresses. With a privately numbered core, the ISP itself will still
have the capability to perform name resolution of their own
infrastructure. However others outside of the autonomous system will
not have this capability. At best, they will get a number of
unidentified RFC1918 IP addresses returned from a traceroute.
It is also worth noting that in some cases the reverse resolution
requests may leak outside of the AS. Such a situation can add load
to public DNS servers.
9. Operational and Troubleshooting issues
Previous sections of the document have noted issues relating to
network operations and troubleshooting. In particular when private
IP addressing within an ISP core is used, the ability to easily
troubleshoot across the AS boundary may be limited. In some cases
this may be a serious troubleshooting impediment. In other cases, it
may be solved through the use of alternative troubleshooting
techniques.
The key point is that the flexibility of initiating an outbound ping
or traceroute from a privately numbered section of the network is
lost. In a complex topology, with multiple paths and exit points
from the AS, the provider may be restricted in their ability to trace
paths through the network to other ASs. Such a situation could be a
severe troubleshooting impediment.
For users outside of the AS, the loss of the ability to use a
traceroute for troubleshooting is very often a serious issue. As
soon as many of these people see a row of "* * *" in a traceroute
they often incorrectly assume that a large part of the network is
down or inaccessible (e.g. behind a firewall). Operational
experience in many large providers has shown that significant
confusion can result.
10. Security Considerations
One of the arguments often put forward for the use of private
addressing within an ISP is an improvement in the network security.
It has been argued that if private addressing is used within the
core, the network infrastructure becomes unreachable from outside the
providers autonomous system, hence protecting the infrastructure.
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There is legitimacy to this argument. Certainly if the core is
privately numbered and unreachable, it potentially provides a level
of isolation in addition to what can be achieved with other
techniques, such as infrastructure ACLs, on their own. This is
especially true in the event of an ACL misconfiguration, something
that does commonly occur as the result of human error.
There are three key security gaps that exist in a privately addressed
IP core.
The approach does not protect against reflection attacks if edge
anti-spoofing is not deployed. For example, if a packet with
spoofed source address corresponding to the networks
infrastructure address range, is sent to a host (or other device)
attached to the network, that host will send its response directly
to the infrastructure address. If such an attack was performed
across a large number of hosts, then a successful large scale
denial of service attack on the infrastructure could be achieved.
This is not to say that a publicly numbered core will protect from
the same attack, it won't. The key point is that a reflection
attack does get around the apparent security offered in a
privately addressed core.
Even if anti-spoofing is deployed at the AS boundary, the border
routers will potentially carry routing information for the
privately addressed network infrastructure. This can mean that
packets with spoofed addresses, corresponding to the private
infrastructure addressing, may be considered legitimate by edge
anti-spoofing techniques such as Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding -
Loose Mode, and forwarded. To avoid this situation, an edge anti-
spoofing algorithm such as Unicast Reverse Path Forwarding -
Strict Mode, would be required. Strict approaches can be
problematic in some environments or where asymmetric traffic paths
exist.
The approach on its own does not protect the network
infrastructure from directly connected customers (i.e. within the
same AS). Unless other security controls, such as access control
lists (ACLs), are deployed at the ingress point of the network,
customer devices will normally be able to reach, and potentially
attack, both core and edge infrastructure devices.
11. Alternate approaches to core network security
Today, hardware-based ACLs, which have minimal to no performance
impact, are now widespread. Applying an ACL at the AS perimeter to
prevent access to the network core may be a far simpler approach and
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provide comparable protection to using private addressing, Such a
technique is known as an infrastructure ACL (iACL).
In concept, iACLs provide filtering at the edge network which allows
traffic to cross the network core, but not to terminate on
infrastructure addresses within the core. Proper iACL deployment
will normally allow required network management traffic to be passed,
such that traceroutes and PMTUD can still operate successfully. For
an iACL deployment to be practical, the core network needs to have
been addressed with a relatively small number of contiguous address
blocks. For this reason, the technique may or may not be practical.
A second approach to preventing external access to the core is IS-IS
core hiding. This technique makes use of a fundamental property of
the IS-IS protocol which allows link addresses to be removed from the
routing table while still allowing loopback addresses to be resolved
as next hops for BGP. The technique prevents parties outside the AS
from being able to route to infrastructure addresses, while still
allowing traceroutes to operate successfully. IS-IS core hiding does
not have the same practical requirement for the core to be addressed
from a small number of contiguous address blocks as with iACLs.
A third approach is the use of either an MPLS based IP VPN, or an
MPLS based IP Core where the 'P' routers (or Label Switch Routers) do
not carry global routing information. As the core 'P' routers (or
Label Switch Routers) are only switching labeled traffic, they are
effectively not reachable from outside of the MPLS domain. The 'P'
routers can optionally be hidden such they do not appear in a
traceroute. While this approach isolates the 'P' routers from
directed attacks, it does not protect the edge routers - being either
a 'PE' router or a Label Edge Router (LER). Obviously there are
numerous other engineering considerations in such an approach, we
simply note it as an option.
These techniques may not be suitable for every network, however,
there are many circumstances where they can be used successfully
without the associated effects of a privately addressing the core.
12. Normative References
[NANOG] Various, "Various Nanog mail archives".
[RFC1918] Rekhter , Y., Moskowitz, R., Karrenberg, D., Jan de Groot,
G., and E. Lear , "RFC1918 Address Allocation for Private
Internets, BCP 5", Febuary 1996.
[RFC2728] Ferguson, P. and D. Senie , "RFC 2827 Network Ingress
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Filtering, BCP 38", May 2000.
[draft-ietf-dnsop-as112-ops-08]
Abley, J. and W. Maton, "AS112 Nameserver Operations",
April 2011.
Appendix A. Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the following people for their input
and review - Dan Wing (Cisco Systems), Roland Dobbins (Arbor
Networks), Philip Smith (Cisco Systems), Barry Greene (ISC), Anton
Ivanov (kot-begemot.co.uk), Ryan Mcdowell (Cisco Systems), Russ White
(Cisco Systems), Gregg Schudel (Cisco Systems), Michael Behringer
(Cisco Systems), Stephan Millet (Cisco Systems).
Author's Address
Anthony Kirkham
Cisco Systems
Level 12
300 Adelaide St
Brisbane, Queensland 4000
Australia
Phone: +61 7 32388203
Email: tkirkham@cisco.com
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