IETF IPng Working Group David B. Johnson INTERNET-DRAFT Carnegie Mellon University Stephen E. Deering Cisco Systems, Inc. 7 August 1998 Reserved IPv6 Subnet Anycast Addresses Status of This Memo This document is a submission by the IPng Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Comments should be submitted to the Working Group mailing list at "ipng@sunroof.Eng.Sun.COM". Distribution of this memo is unlimited. This document is an Internet-Draft. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. 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." To view the entire list of current Internet-Drafts, please check the "1id-abstracts.txt" listing contained in the Internet-Drafts Shadow Directories on ftp.is.co.za (Africa), ftp.nordu.net (Northern Europe), ftp.nis.garr.it (Southern Europe), munnari.oz.au (Pacific Rim), ftp.ietf.org (US East Coast), or ftp.isi.edu (US West Coast). Abstract The IP Version 6 addressing architecture defines an "anycast" address as an IPv6 address that is assigned to more than one network interface (typically belonging to different nodes), with the property that a packet sent to an anycast address is routed to the "nearest" interface having that address, according to the routing protocols' measure of distance. This document defines a set of reserved anycast addresses within each subnet prefix, and lists the initial allocation of these reserved subnet anycast addresses. Johnson and Deering Expires 7 February 1999 [Page i] INTERNET-DRAFT Reserved IPv6 Subnet Anycast Addresses 7 August 1998 1. Introduction IP Version 6 (IPv6) defines a new type of address, known as an "anycast" address, that allows a packet to be routed to one of a number of different nodes all responding to the same address [1, 2]. The anycast address may be assigned to one or more network interfaces (typically on different nodes), with the network delivering packets addressed to this address to the "nearest" interface based on the notion of "distance" determined by the routing protocols in use. The uses of anycast addresses are still evolving, but such addresses offer the potential for a number of important services [4, 5]. For example, an anycast address may be used to allow nodes to access one of a collection of servers providing a well-known service, without manual configuration in each node of the list of servers; or an anycast address may be used in a source route to force routing through a specific internet service provider, without limiting routing to a single specific router providing access to that ISP. IPv6 defines a required Subnet-Router anycast address [2] for all routers within a subnet prefix, and allows additional anycast addresses to be taken from the unicast address space. This document defines an additional set of reserved anycast addresses within each subnet prefix, and lists the initial allocation of these reserved subnet anycast addresses. 2. Format of Reserved Subnet Anycast Addresses Within each subnet, the highest 128 interface ID values are reserved for assignment as subnet anycast addresses. Specifically, these reserved subnet anycast addresses have the format: | n bits | 121-n bits | 7 bits | +---------------------------------+------------------+------------+ | subnet prefix | 1111111...111111 | anycast ID | +---------------------------------+------------------+------------+ | interface ID field | The n-bit "subnet prefix" consists of all fields of the IPv6 address except the interface ID field. The interface ID field here is formed from a 7-bit "anycast ID", with the remaining (highest order) 121-n bits filled with all one's. The "anycast ID" identifies a particular reserved anycast address within the subnet prefix, from the set of reserved subnet anycast addresses. The motivation for reserving the highest addresses from each subnet rather than the lowest addresses, is to avoid conflicting with some existing official and unofficial uses of the low-numbered addresses in a prefix. For example, these low-numbered addresses are often Johnson and Deering Expires 7 February 1999 [Page 1] INTERNET-DRAFT Reserved IPv6 Subnet Anycast Addresses 7 August 1998 used for the ends of a point-to-point link, for tunnel endpoints, for manually configured unicast addresses when a hardware token is not available for the network interface, and even for manually configured static addresses for the routers on a link. Reserving only 128 values for anycast IDs (rather than perhaps 256) means that the minimum possible size of interface IDs in an IPv6 address is 8 bits, allowing the division between subnet prefix and interface ID in this case to be byte-aligned. As with all IPv6 anycast addresses [2], these reserved subnet anycast addresses are allocated from the IPv6 unicast address space. All reserved subnet anycast addresses as defined in this document are reserved on all links, with all subnet prefixes. They MUST NOT be used for unicast addresses assigned to any interface. 3. List of Reserved Anycast Addresses Currently, the following anycast IDs for these reserved subnet anycast addresses are defined: Decimal Hexadecimal Description ------- ----------- ----------- 127 7F Reserved 126 7E Mobile IPv6 Home-Agents anycast [3] 0-125 00-7D Reserved Additional anycast IDs are expected to be defined in the future. 4. IANA Considerations This document defines a set of reserved anycast addresses, based on a set of anycast IDs within each subnet prefix in the IPv6 unicast address space. As future needs arise, new anycast IDs may be defined. Such anycast IDs MUST be reserved within all subnet prefixes, and so the assignment of these anycast IDs requires centralized administration. New values SHOULD be assigned in descending numerical order and are expected to be assigned only with IESG approval. 5. Security Considerations The use of any type of reserved anycast addresses poses a security concern only in allowing potential attackers a well-known address to attack. By designating certain services to be located at specific reserved anycast addresses, an attacker may more profitably focus an attack against such a specific service. Any such attack, however, is best dealt with in each service that uses a reserved anycast address. Johnson and Deering Expires 7 February 1999 [Page 2] INTERNET-DRAFT Reserved IPv6 Subnet Anycast Addresses 7 August 1998 RFC 1546, which originally proposed the idea of anycasting in IP, also points out a number of security considerations with the use of anycasting in general [5]. References [1] Stephen E. Deering and Robert M. Hinden. Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) specification. Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-ipngwg-ipv6-spec-v2-02.txt, August 1998. Work in progress. [2] Robert M. Hinden and Stephen E. Deering. IP Version 6 addressing architecture. RFC 2373, July 1998. [3] David B. Johnson and Charles Perkins. Mobility support in IPv6. Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-mobileip-ipv6-06.txt, August 1998. Work in progress. [4] Steve King et al. The case for IPv6. Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-iab-case-for-ipv6-01.txt, March 1998. Work in progress. [5] Craig Partridge, Trevor Mendez, and Walter Milliken. Host anycasting service. RFC 1546, November 1993. Authors' Addresses David B. Johnson Stephen E. Deering Carnegie Mellon University Cisco Systems, Inc. Computer Science Department 170 West Tasman Drive 5000 Forbes Avenue San Jose, CA 95134-1706 Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891 USA USA Phone: +1 412 268-7399 Phone: +1 408 527-8213 Fax: +1 412 268-5576 Fax: +1 408 527-8254 Email: dbj@cs.cmu.edu Email: deering@cisco.com Johnson and Deering Expires 7 February 1999 [Page 3]