Subject: WG Action: RECHARTER: Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (bfd)

From: IESG Secretary <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:40:13 -0700 (PDT)

The Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (bfd) working group in the 
Routing Area of the IETF has been rechartered.  For additional 
information, please contact the Area Directors or the working group 
Chairs.

Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (bfd)
---------------------------------------------------
Current Status: Active Working Group

Chairs:
  David Ward <[email-masked]>
  Jeffrey Haas <[email-masked]>

Routing Area Directors:
  Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
  Adrian Farrel <[email-masked]>

Routing Area Advisor:
  Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>

Technical Advisor:
  Dave Katz <[email-masked]>

Mailing List:
  Address:	[email-masked]
  To Subscribe:	http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/rtg-bfd
  Archive:	http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtg-bfd/

Description of Working Group:

The BFD Working Group is chartered to standardize and support the
bidirectional forwarding detection protocol (BFD) and its extensions.  A
core goal of the working group is to standardize BFD in the context of 
IP routing, or protocols such as MPLS that are based on IP routing, in a 
way that will encourage multiple, inter-operable vendor implementations.  
The Working Group will also provide advice and guidance on BFD to other 
working groups or standards bodies as requested.

BFD is a protocol intended to detect faults in the bidirectional path
between two forwarding engines, including physical interfaces,
subinterfaces, data link(s), and to the extent possible the forwarding
engines themselves, with potentially very low latency. It operates
independently of media, data protocols, and routing protocols. An
additional goal is to provide a single mechanism that can be used for
liveness detection over any media, at any protocol layer, with
a wide range of detection times and overhead, to avoid a proliferation
of different methods.

Important characteristics of BFD include:

- Simple, fixed-field encoding to facilitate implementations in 
  hardware.

- Independence of the data protocol being forwarded between two systems.
  BFD packets are carried as the payload of whatever encapsulating 
  protocol is appropriate for the medium and network.

- Path independence: BFD can provide failure detection on any kind of 
  path between systems, including direct physical links, virtual 
  circuits, tunnels, MPLS LSPs, multihop routed paths, and 
  unidirectional links (so long as there is some return path, of 
  course).

- Ability to be bootstrapped by any other protocol that automatically 
  forms peer, neighbor or adjacency relationships to seed BFD endpoint 
  discovery.

The working group is chartered to complete the following work items:

1. Develop the MIB module for BFD and submit it to the IESG for 
publication as a Proposed Standard.

2a. Provide a generic keying-based cryptographic authentication 
mechanism for the BFD protocol.  This mechanism will support 
authentication through a key identifier for the BFD session's Security 
Association rather than specifying new authentication extensions.

2b. Provide extensions to the BFD MIB in support of the generic keying-
based cryptographic authentication mechanism.

2c. Specify cryptographic authentication procedures for the BFD protocol
using HMAC-SHA-256 (possibly truncated to a smaller integrity check 
value) using the generic keying-based cryptographic authentication 
mechanism.

3. Provide an extension to the BFD core protocol in support of
point-to-multipoint links and networks.

4. Provide a mechanism for bootstrapping BFD on dynamically configured 
edge devices using DHCPv4 and DHCPv6.

5. Assist in the standardization of the BFD protocol for MPLS-TP.  The
preferred solution will be interoperable with the current BFD specification.

6. Assist with the standardization of the BFD protocol for Trill.

Goals and Milestones:

Done       Submit the base protocol specification to the IESG to be
           considered as a Proposed Standard.
Done       Submit BFD encapsulation and usage profile for single-hop
           IPv4 and IPv6 adjacencies to the IESG to be considered as a
           Proposed Standard
Done       Submit BFD encapsulation and usage profile for MPLS LSPs to
           the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard
Done       Submit BFD encapsulation and usage profile for multi-hop IPv4
           and IPv6 adjacencies to the IESG to be considered as a
           Proposed Standard

Sep 2011   Submit the BFD MIB to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed
           Standard

Dec 2011   Submit the generic keying based cryptographic authentication
           mechanism to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard

Dec 2011   Submit a BFD MIB extension in support of the generic keying
           document to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard

Dec 2011   Submit the cryptographic authentication procedures for BFD
           to the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard

Mar 2012   Submit the the document on BFD point-to-multipoint support to
           the IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard

Jun 2012   Submit the bootstrapping mechanism for BFD using DHCP to the
           IESG to be considered as a Proposed Standard