Subject: [lisp] A number of issues I'm not bringing up

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:51:29 -0400

Speaking as an individual.

So, there are a number of issues I'm holding onto and explicitly not
bringing to the list.  That's generally a fairly bad sign in terms of
confidence in the process so I thought I'd share my reasons.

1) Many issues depend on understanding deployment.  It's my belief
that we have made and are making decisions that seem internally
inconsistent--for example decisions that only make sense if all LISP
devices are placed near the core of the network while making other
decisions that only make sense if some LISP devices are placed very
near the edge.  I'm trying to identify these inconsistencies, but it
doesn't make sense to bring them forward until we have a discussion
about deployment.  Darrel has an action item that will hopefully
bootstrap that process.

2) Understanding security.  Many decisions we're making seem to open
us up to a number of attacks that other parts of the IETF have
considered serious when evaluating similar technologies.  We need to
begin to have a discussion of our security model--particularly on the
data plane and the parts of the mapping system close to the XTRs
before it makes sense to discuss these.  IN particular, the LISP WG
needs to become informed about what the rest of the IETF has done in
this space and why, both to have common terminology about attacks as
well as to intelligently agree or disagree with the conclusions of the
IETF.

3) The WG is not yet large enough for serious consideration of
significantly divergent opinion.  We have a fairly small WG at this
point.  We don't have a fairly good representation from the internet
area, transport area, or IETF at large here.  A lot of issues I might
want to bring up would wedge us fairly fast into a situation where a
minority thought one thing, and a majority thought another.  In my
judgment there would not be much chance of building an informed
consensus one way or another.  We need to pull in more people from all
around the IETF if we're going to be successful.

If we don't, I suspect that I and others will be bringing up large
architectural issues during IETF-wide last call.  That won't be fun
for anyone.  However I'm going to introduce an issue at the point
where I think it has the highest chance of being seriously considered;
doing otherwise involves way too much tilting at windmills.