Updates to the Allocation Policy for the Border Gateway Protocol - Link State (BGP-LS) Parameters Registries

Border Gateway Protocol - Link State (BGP-LS) requested IANA to create a registry consistent called the "Border Gateway Protocol - Link State (BGP-LS) Parameters Registry" with a number of sub-registries. The allocation policy applied by IANA for those policies is "Specification Required" as defined in . The "Specification Required" policy requires evaluation of any assignment request by a "Designated Expert" and guidelines for any such experts are given in section 5.1 of . In addition, this policy requires "the values and their meanings must be documented in a permanent and readily available public specification, in sufficient detail so that interoperability between independent implementations is possible" . Further, the intention behind "permanent and readily available" is that "a document can reasonably be expected to be findable and retrievable long after IANA assignment of the requested value" . It is often considered that it is the responsiblity of the Designated Expert to make a determination as to whether a specification meets the requirement to be permanent and readily publically available. A degree of contention arises in this case because Internet-Drafts are now permanently archived in the IETF&s tools archive, yet each such document is marked with a piece of boilerplate text as follows that brings doubt about its suitability as a permanent record: Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." Another allocation policy called "Expert Review" is defined in . This policy also requires Expert Review, but has no requirement for a formal document. All reviews by Designated Experts are guided by advice given in the document that defined the registry and set the allocation policy. This document updates RFC 7752 by changing the allocation policy for all of the registries to "Expert Review" and updating the guidance to the Expert Review.

IANA maintains a registry called the "Border Gateway Protocol - Link State (BGP-LS) Parameters Registry". This registry contains four sub-registries: BGP-LS NLRI-Types BGP-LS Node Descriptor, Link Descriptor, Prefix Descriptor, and Attribute TLVs BGP-LS Protocol-IDs BGP-LS Well-Known Instance-IDs IANA is requested to change the assignment policy for each of these registries to "Expert Review".

Section 5.1 of gives guidance to Designated Experts. This section replaces that guidance. It should be noted that the only change to this guidance is the removal of the requirement of formal documentation. In all cases of review by the Designated Expert (DE) described here, the DE is expected to check the clarity of purpose and use of the requested code points. Last, the DE must verify that any specification produced in the IETF that requests one of these code points has been made available for review by the IDR working group in the form of an Internet-Draft, and that any other request for a code point does not conflict with work that is active or already published within the IETF.

The security consideratoin of still apply. Note that the change to the expert review guildelines make the registry and the Designated Experts slightly more vulnerable to denial of service attacks through excessive and bigus requests for code points. It is expected that the registry cannot be effectively attacked because the Designated Experts would, themselves, fall to any such attack first. Designated Experts are expected to report to the IDR working group chairs and responsible Area Director if they believe an attack to be in progress, and should immediately halt all requests for allocation. This may temporarily block all legitimate risks until mitigations have been put in place. This change in allocation policy should not have any effect on the integrity of BGP-LS since there is no change to the review requirements for the work that underlies the request.

This work is based on the IANA considerations section of . The author thanks the people who worked on that document. The author would like to be able to thank John Scudder for suggesting the need for this document.