Network Working Group                                     H. Schulzrinne
Request for Comments: 3487                           Columbia University
Category: Informational                                    February 2003


        Requirements for Resource Priority Mechanisms for the
                  Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)

Status of this Memo

  This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
  not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
  memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

  Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

  This document summarizes requirements for prioritizing access to
  circuit-switched network, end system and proxy resources for
  emergency preparedness communications using the Session Initiation
  Protocol (SIP).

Table of Contents

  1.  Introduction ................................................  2
  2.  Terminology .................................................  3
  3.  Resources ...................................................  4
  4.  Network Topologies ..........................................  5
  5.  Network Models ..............................................  6
  6.  Relationship to Emergency Call Services .....................  7
  7.  SIP Call Routing ............................................  8
  8.  Policy and Mechanism ........................................  8
  9.  Requirements ................................................  9
  10. Security Requirements ....................................... 12
      10.1 Authentication and Authorization ....................... 12
      10.2 Confidentiality and Integrity .......................... 13
      10.3 Anonymity .............................................. 14
      10.4 Denial-of-Service Attacks .............................. 14
  11. Security Considerations ..................................... 15
  12. Acknowledgements ............................................ 15
  13. Normative References ........................................ 15
  14. Informative References ...................................... 15
  15. Author's Address ............................................ 16
  16. Full Copyright Statement .................................... 17




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1.  Introduction

  During emergencies, communications resources including telephone
  circuits, IP bandwidth and gateways between the circuit-switched and
  IP networks may become congested.  Congestion can occur due to heavy
  usage, loss of resources caused by the natural or man-made disaster
  and attacks on the network during man-made emergencies.  This
  congestion may make it difficult for persons charged with emergency
  assistance, recovery or law enforcement to coordinate their efforts.
  As IP networks become part of converged or hybrid networks along with
  public and private circuit-switched (telephone) networks, it becomes
  necessary to ensure that these networks can assist during such
  emergencies.

  There are many IP-based services that can assist during emergencies.
  This memo only covers requirements for real-time communications
  applications involving the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) [1],
  including voice-over-IP, multimedia conferencing and instant
  messaging/presence.

  This document takes no position as to which mode of communication is
  preferred during an emergency, as such discussion appears to be of
  little practical value.  Based on past experience, real-time
  communications is likely to be an important component of any overall
  suite of applications, particularly for coordination of emergency-
  related efforts.

  As we will describe in detail below, such Session Initiation Protocol
  (SIP) [1] applications involve at least five different resources that
  may become scarce and congested during emergencies.  In order to
  improve emergency response, it may become necessary to prioritize
  access to such resources during periods of emergency-induced resource
  scarcity.  We call this "resource prioritization".

  This document describes requirements rather than possible existing or
  new protocol features.  Although it is scoped to deal with SIP-based
  applications, this should not be taken to imply that mechanisms have
  to be SIP protocol features such as header fields, methods or URI
  parameters.

  The document is organized as follows.  In Section 2, we explain core
  technical terms and acronyms that are used throughout the document.
  Section 3 describes the five types of resources that may be subject
  to resource prioritization.  Section 4 enumerates four network
  hybrids that determine which of these resources are relevant.  Since
  the design choices may be constrained by the assumptions placed on





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  the IP network, Section 5 attempts to classify networks into
  categories according to the restrictions placed on modifications and
  traffic classes.

  Since this is a major source of confusion due to similar names,
  Section 6 attempts to distinguish emergency call services placed by
  civilians from the topic of this document.

  Request routing is a core component of SIP, covered in Section 7.

  Providing resource priority entails complex implementation choices,
  so that a single priority scheme leads to a set of algorithms that
  manage queues, resource consumption and resource usage of existing
  calls.  Even within a single administrative domain, the combination
  of mechanisms is likely to vary.  Since it will also depend on the
  interaction of different policies, it appears inappropriate to have
  SIP applications specify the precise mechanisms.  Section 8 discusses
  the call-by-value (specification of mechanisms) and call-by-reference
  (invoke labeled policy) distinction.

  Based on these discussions, Section 9 summarizes some general
  requirements that try to achieve generality and feature-transparency
  across hybrid networks.

  The most challenging component of resource prioritization is likely
  to be security (Section 10).  Without adequate security mechanisms,
  resource priority may cause more harm than good, so that the section
  attempts to enumerate some of the specific threats present when
  resource prioritization is being employed.

2.  Terminology

  CSN: Circuit-switched network, encompassing both private
     (closed) networks and the public switched telephone network
     (PSTN).

  ETS: Emergency telecommunications service, identifying a
     communications service to be used during large-scale emergencies
     that allows authorized individuals to communicate.  Such
     communication may reach end points either within a closed network
     or any endpoint on the CSN or the Internet.  The communication
     service may use voice, video, text or other multimedia streams.

  Request: In this document, we define "request" as any SIP
     request.  This includes call setup requests, instant message
     requests and event notification requests.





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3.  Resources

  Prioritized access to at least five resource types may be useful:

  Gateway resources: The number of channels (trunks) on a CSN
     gateway is finite.  Resource prioritization may prioritize access
     to these channels, by priority queuing or preemption.

  CSN resources: Resources in the CSN itself, away from the access
     gateway, may be congested.  This is the domain of traditional
     resource prioritization mechanisms such as MLPP and GETS, where
     circuits are granted to ETS communications based on queuing
     priority or preemption (if allowed by local telecommunication
     regulatory policy and local administrative procedures).  A gateway
     may also use alternate routing (Section 8) to increase the
     probability of call completion.

     Specifying CSN behavior is beyond the scope of this document, but
     as noted below, a central requirement is to be able to invoke all
     such behaviors from an IP endpoint.

  IP network resources: SIP may initiate voice and multimedia
     sessions.  In many cases, audio and video streams are inelastic
     and have tight delay and loss requirements.  Under conditions of
     IP network overload, emergency services applications may not be
     able to obtain sufficient bandwidth in any network.  When there
     are insufficient network resources for all users and it is not
     practical to simply add more resources, quality of service
     management is necessary to solve this problem.  This is orthogonal
     to SIP, out of the scope for SIP, and as such these requirements
     will be discussed in another document.

     Bandwidth used for SIP signaling itself may be subject to
     prioritization.

  Receiving end system resources: End systems may include
     automatic call distribution systems (ACDs) or media servers as
     well as traditional telephone-like devices.  Gateways are also end
     systems, but have been discussed earlier.

     Since the receiving end system can only manage a finite number of
     sessions, a prioritized call may need to preempt an existing call
     or indicate to the callee that a high-priority call is waiting.
     (The precise user agent behavior is beyond the scope of this
     document and considered a matter of policy and implementation.)






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     Such terminating services may be needed to avoid overloading, say,
     an emergency coordination center. However, other approaches beyond
     prioritization, e.g., random request dropping by geographic
     origin, need to be employed if the number of prioritized calls
     exceeds the terminating capacity.  Such approaches are beyond the
     scope of this memo.

  SIP proxy resources: While SIP proxies often have large request
     handling capacities, their capacity is likely to be smaller than
     their access network bandwidth.  (This is true in particular since
     different SIP requests consume vastly different amounts of proxy
     computational resources, depending on whether they invoke external
     services, sip-cgi [2] and CPL [3] scripts, etc.  Thus, avoiding
     proxy overload by restricting access bandwidth is likely to lead
     to inefficient utilization of the proxy.)  Therefore, some types
     of proxies may need to silently drop selected SIP requests under
     overload, reject requests, with overload indication or provide
     multiple queues with different drop and scheduling priorities for
     different types of SIP requests.  However, this is strictly an
     implementation issue and does not appear to influence the protocol
     requirements nor the on-the-wire protocol.  Thus, it is out of
     scope for the protocol requirements discussion pursued here.

     Responses should naturally receive the same treatment as the
     corresponding request.  Responses already have to be securely
     mapped to requests, so this requirement does not pose a
     significant burden.  Since proxies often do not maintain call
     state, it is not generally feasible to assign elevated priority to
     requests originating from a lower-privileged callee back to the
     higher-privileged caller.

  There is no requirement that a single mechanism be used for all five
  resources.

4.  Network Topologies

  We consider four types of combinations of IP and circuit-switched
  networks.

  IP end-to-end: Both request originator and destination are on an
     IP network, without intervening CSN-IP gateways.  Here, any SIP
     request could be subject to prioritization.

  IP-to-CSN (IP at the start): The request originator is in the IP
     network, while the callee is in the CSN.  Clearly, this model only
     applies to SIP-originated phone calls, not generic SIP requests
     such as those supporting instant messaging services.




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  CSN-to-IP (IP at the end): A call originates in the CSN and
     terminates, via an Internet telephony gateway, in the IP network.

  CSN-IP-CSN (IP bridging): This is a concatenation of the two
     previous ones.  It is worth calling out specifically to note that
     the two CSN sides may use different signaling protocols.  Also,
     the originating CSN endpoint and the gateway to the IP network may
     not know the nature of the terminating CSN.  Thus, encapsulation
     of originating CSN information is insufficient.

  The bridging model (IP-CSN-IP) can be treated as the concatenation of
  the IP-to-CSN and CSN-to-IP cases.

  It is worth emphasizing that CSN-to-IP gateways are unlikely to know
  whether the final destination is in the IP network, the CSN or, via
  SIP forking, in both.

  These models differ in the type of controllable resources, identified
  as gateway, CSN, IP network resources, proxy and receiver.  Items
  marked as (x) are beyond the scope of this document.

  Topology       Gateway  CSN  IP   proxy  receiver
  _________________________________________________
  IP-end-to-end                (x)  (x)    x
  IP-to-CSN      x        x    (x)  (x)    (x)
  CSN-to-IP      x        x    (x)  (x)    x
  CSN-IP-CSN     x        x    (x)  (x)    (x)

5.  Network Models

  There are at least four IP network models that influence the
  requirements for resource priority.  Each model inherits the
  restrictions of the model above it.

  Pre-configured for ETS: In a pre-configured network, an ETS
     application can use any protocol carried in IP packets and modify
     the behavior of existing protocols.  As an example, if an ETS
     agency owns the IP network, it can add traffic shaping, scheduling
     or support for a resource reservation protocol to routers.

  Transparent: In a transparent network, an ETS application can
     rely on the network to forward all valid IP packets, however, the
     ETS application cannot modify network elements.  Commercial ISP
     offer transparent networks as long as they do not filter certain
     types of packets.  Networks employing firewalls, NATs and
     "transparent" proxies are not transparent.  Sometimes, these types
     of networks are also called common-carrier networks since they
     carry IP packets without concern as to their content.



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  SIP/RTP transparent: Networks that are SIP/RTP transparent allow
     users to place and receive SIP calls.  The network allows ingress
     and egress for all valid SIP messages, possibly subject to
     authentication.  Similarly, it allows RTP media streams in both
     directions.  However, it may block, in either inbound or outbound
     direction, other protocols such as RSVP or it may disallow non-
     zero DSCPs.  There are many degrees of SIP/RTP transparency, e.g.,
     depending on whether firewalls require inspection of SDP content,
     thus precluding end-to-end encryption of certain SIP message
     bodies, or whether only outbound calls are allowed.  Many
     firewalled corporate networks and semi-public access networks such
     as in hotels are likely to fall into this category.

  Restricted SIP networks: In restricted SIP networks, users may
     be restricted to particular SIP applications and cannot add SIP
     protocol elements such as header fields or use SIP methods beyond
     a prescribed set.  It appears likely that 3GPP/3GPP2 networks will
     fall into this category, at least initially.

     A separate and distinct problem are SIP networks that
     administratively prohibit or fail to configure access to special
     access numbers, e.g., the 710 area code used by GETS.  Such
     operational failures are beyond the reach of a protocol
     specification.

  It appears desirable that ETS users can employ the broadest possible
  set of networks during an emergency.  Thus, it appears preferable
  that protocol enhancements work at least in SIP/RTP transparent
  networks and are added explicitly to restricted SIP networks.

  The existing GETS system relies on a transparent network, allowing
  use from most unmodified telephones, while MLPP systems are typically
  pre-configured.

6.  Relationship to Emergency Call Services

  The resource priority mechanisms are used to have selected
  individuals place calls with elevated priority during times when the
  network is suffering from a shortage of resources.  Generally, calls
  for emergency help placed by non-officials (e.g., "911" and "112"
  calls) do not need resource priority under normal circumstances.  If
  such emergency calls are placed during emergency-induced network
  resource shortages, the call identifier itself is sufficient to
  identify the emergency nature of the call.  Adding an indication of
  resource priority may be less appropriate, as this would require that
  all such calls carry this indicator.  Also, it opens another attack





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  mechanism, where non-emergency calls are marked as emergency calls.
  (If network elements can recognize the request URI as an emergency
  call, they would not need the resource priority mechanism.)

7.  SIP Call Routing

  The routing of a SIP request, i.e., the proxies it visits and the UAs
  it ends up at, may depend on the fact that the SIP request is an ETS
  request.  The set of destinations may be larger or smaller, depending
  on the SIP request routing policies implemented by proxies.  For
  example, certain gateways may be reserved for ETS use and thus only
  be reached by labeled SIP requests.

8.  Policy and Mechanism

  Most priority mechanisms can be roughly categorized by whether they:

  o  use a priority queue for resource attempts,

  o  make additional resources available (e.g., via alternate routing
     (ACR)), or

  o  preempt existing resource users (e.g., calls.)

  For example, in GETS, alternate routing attempts to use alternate
  GETS-enabled interexchange carriers (IXC) if it cannot be completed
  through the first-choice carrier.

  Priority mechanisms may also exempt certain calls from network
  management traffic controls.

  The choice between these mechanisms depends on the operational needs
  and characteristics of the network, e.g., on the number of active
  requests in the system and the fraction of prioritized calls.
  Generally, if the number of prioritized calls is small compared to
  the system capacity and the system capacity is large, it is likely
  that another call will naturally terminate in short order when a
  higher-priority call arrives.  Thus, it is conceivable that the
  priority indication can cause preemption in some network entities,
  while elsewhere it just influences whether requests are queued
  instead of discarded and what queueing policy is being applied.

  Some namespaces may inherently imply a preemption policy, while
  others may be silent on whether preemption is to be used or not,
  leaving this to local entity policy.






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  Similarly, the precise relationships between labels, e.g., what
  fraction of capacity is set aside for each priority level, is also a
  matter of local policy.  This is similar to how differentiated
  services labels are handled.

9.  Requirements

  In the PSTN and certain private circuit-switched networks, such as
  those run by military organizations, calls are marked in various ways
  to indicate priorities.  We call this a "priority scheme".

  Below are some requirements for providing a similar feature in a SIP
  environment; security requirements are discussed in Section 10.  We
  will refer to the feature as a "SIP indication" and to requests
  carrying such an indication as "labelled requests".

  Note:  Not all the following requirements are possible to meet at
  once.  They may represent in some case tradeoffs that must be
  considered by the designer.

  REQ-1: Not specific to one scheme or country: The SIP indication
     should support existing and future priority schemes.  For example,
     there are currently at least four priority schemes in widespread
     use: Q.735, also implemented by the U.S.  defense telephone
     network ("DSN" or "Autovon") and NATO, has five levels, the United
     States GETS (Government Emergency Telecommunications Systems)
     scheme with implied higher priority and the British Government
     Telephone Preference Scheme (GTPS) system, which provides three
     priority levels for receipt of dial tone.

     The SIP indication may support these existing CSN priority schemes
     through the use of different namespaces.

     Private-use namespaces may also be useful for certain
     applications.

  REQ-2: Independent of particular network architecture: The SIP
     indication should work in the widest variety of SIP-based systems.
     It should not be restricted to particular operators or types of
     networks, such as wireless networks or protocol profiles and
     dialects in certain types of networks.  The originator of a SIP
     request cannot be expected to know what kind of circuit-switched
     technology is used by the destination gateway.

  REQ-3: Invisible to network (IP) layer: The SIP indication must
     be usable in IP networks that are unaware of the enhancement and
     in SIP/RTP-transparent networks.




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     This requirement can be translated to mean that the request has to
     be a valid SIP request and that out-of-band signaling is not
     acceptable.

  REQ-4: Mapping of existing schemes: Existing CSN schemes must be
     translatable to SIP-based systems.

  REQ-5: No loss of information: For the CSN-IP-CSN case, there
     should be no loss of signaling information caused by translation
     from CSN signaling SIP and back from SIP to CSN signaling if both
     circuit-switched networks use the same priority scheme.  Loss of
     information may be unavoidable if the destination CSN uses a
     different priority scheme from the origin.

     One cannot assume that both CSNs are using the same signaling
     protocol or protocol version, such as ISUP, so that transporting
     ISUP objects in MIME [4,5] is unlikely to be sufficient.

  REQ-6: Extensibility: Any naming scheme specified as part of the
     SIP indication should allow for future expansion.  Expanded naming
     schemes may be needed as resource priority is applied in
     additional private networks, or if VoIP-specific priority schemes
     are defined.

  REQ-7: Separation of policy and mechanism: The SIP indication
     should not describe a particular detailed treatment, as it is
     likely that this depends on the nature of the resource and local
     policy.  Instead, it should invoke a particular named policy.  As
     an example, instead of specifying that a certain SIP request
     should be granted queueing priority, not cause preemption, but be
     restricted to three-minute sessions, the request invokes a certain
     named policy that may well have those properties in a particular
     implementation.  An IP-to-CSN gateway may need to be aware of the
     specific actions required for the policy, but the protocol
     indication itself should not.

     Even in the CSN, the same MLPP indication may result in different
     behavior for different networks.

  REQ-8: Method-neutral: The SIP indication chosen should work for
     any SIP method, not just, say, INVITE.

  REQ-9: Default behavior: Network terminals configured to use a
     priority scheme may occasionally end up making calls in a network
     that does not support such a scheme.  In those cases, the protocol
     must support a sensible default behavior that treats the call no
     worse than a call that did not invoke the priority scheme.  Some
     networks may choose to disallow calls unless they have a suitable



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     priority marking and appropriate authentication.  This is a matter
     of local policy.

  REQ-10: Address-neutral: Any address or URI scheme may be a
     valid destination and must be usable with the priority scheme.
     The SIP indication cannot rely on identifying a set of destination
     addresses or URI schemes for special treatment.  This requirement
     is motivated by existing ETS systems.  For example, in GETS and
     similar systems, the caller can reach any PSTN destination with
     increased probability of call completion, not just a limited set.
     (This does not preclude local policy that allows or disallows,
     say, calls to international numbers for certain users.)

     Some schemes may have an open set of destinations, such as any
     valid E.164 number or any valid domestic telephone number, while
     others may only reach a limited set of destinations.

  REQ-11: Identity-independent: The user identity, such as the
     From header field in SIP, is insufficient to identify the priority
     level of the request.  The same identity can issue non-prioritized
     requests as well as prioritized ones, with the range of priorities
     determined by the job function of the caller.  The choice of the
     priority is made based on human judgement, following a set of
     general rules that are likely to be applied by analogy rather than
     precise mapping of each condition.  For example, a particular
     circumstance may be considered similarly grave compared to one
     which is listed explicitly.

  REQ-12: Independent of network location: While some existing CSN
     schemes restrict the set of priorities based on the line identity,
     it is recognized that future IP-based schemes should be flexible
     enough to avoid such reliance.  Instead, a combination of
     authenticated user identity, user choice and policy determines the
     request treatment.

  REQ-13: Multiple simultaneous schemes: Some user agents will
     need to support multiple different priority schemes, as several
     will remain in use in networks run by different agencies and
     operators.  (Not all user agents will have the means of
     authorizing callers using different schemes, and thus may be
     configured at run-time to only recognize certain namespaces.)

  REQ-14: Discovery: A terminal should be able to discover which,
     if any, priority namespaces are supported by a network element.
     Discovery may be explicit, where a user agent requests a list of
     the supported namespaces or it may be implicit, where it attempts
     to use a particular namespace and is then told that this namespace
     is not supported.  This does not imply that every element has to



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     support the priority scheme.  However, entities should be able
     discover whether a network element supports it or not.

  REQ-15: Testing: It must be possible to test the system outside
     of emergency conditions, to increase the chances that all elements
     work during an actual emergency.  In particular, critical elements
     such as indication, authentication, authorization and call routing
     must be testable.  Testing under load is desirable.  Thus, it is
     desirable that the SIP indication is available continuously, not
     just during emergencies.

  REQ-16: 3PCC: The system has to work with SIP third-party call
     control.

  REQ-17: Proxy-visible: Proxies may want to use the indication to
     influence request routing (see Section 7) or impose additional
     authentication requirements.

10.  Security Requirements

  Any resource priority mechanism can be abused to obtain resources and
  thus deny service to other users.  While the indication itself does
  not have to provide separate authentication, any SIP request carrying
  such information has more rigorous authentication requirements than
  regular requests.  Below, we describe authentication and
  authorization aspects, confidentiality and privacy requirements,
  protection against denial of service attacks and anonymity
  requirements.  Additional discussion can be found in [6].

10.1 Authentication and Authorization

  SEC-1: More rigorous: Prioritized access to network and end
     system resources enumerated in Section 3 imposes particularly
     stringent requirements on authentication and authorization
     mechanisms since access to prioritized resources may impact
     overall system stability and performance, not just result in theft
     of, say, a single phone call.

     The authentication and authorization requirements for ETS calls
     are, in particular, much stronger than for emergency calls (112,
     911), where wide access is the design objective, sacrificing
     caller identification if necessary.

  SEC-2: Attack protection: Under certain emergency conditions,
     the network infrastructure, including its authentication and
     authorization mechanism, may be under attack.  Thus,
     authentication and authorization must be able to survive such
     attacks and defend the resources against these attacks.



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     Mechanisms to delegate authentication and to authenticate as early
     as possible are required.  In particular, the number of packets
     and the amount of other resources such as computation or storage
     that an unauthorized user can consume needs to be minimized.

     Unauthorized users must not be able to block CSN resources, as
     they are likely to be more scarce than packet resources. This
     implies that authentication and authorization must take place on
     the IP network side rather than using, say, a CSN circuit to
     authenticate the caller via a DTMF sequence.

     Given the urgency during emergency events, normal statistical
     fraud detection may be less effective, thus placing a premium on
     reliable authentication.

     SIP nodes should be able to independently verify the authorization
     of requests to receive prioritized service and not rely on
     transitive trust within the network.

  SEC-3: Independent of mechanism: Any indication of the resource
     priority must be independent of the authentication mechanism,
     since end systems will impose different constraints on the
     applicable authentication mechanisms. For example, some end
     systems may only allow user input via a 12-digit keypad, while
     others may have the ability to acquire biometrics or read
     smartcards.

  SEC-4: Non-trusted end systems: Since ETS users may use devices
     that are not their own, systems should support authentication
     mechanisms that do not require the user to reveal her secret, such
     as a PIN or password, to the device.

  SEC-5: Replay: The authentication mechanisms must be resistant
     to replay attacks.

  SEC-6: Cut-and-paste: The authentication mechanisms must be
     resistant to cut-and-paste attacks.

  SEC-7: Bid-down: The authentication mechanisms must be resistant
     to bid down attacks.

10.2 Confidentiality and Integrity

  SEC-8: Confidentiality: All aspects of ETS are likely to be
     sensitive and should be protected from unlawful intercept and
     alteration.  In particular, requirements for protecting the
     confidentiality of communications relationships may be higher than
     for normal commercial service.  For SIP, the To, From,



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     Organization, Subject, Priority and Via header fields are examples
     of particularly sensitive information.  Callers may be willing to
     sacrifice confidentiality if the only alternative is abandoning
     the call attempt.

     Unauthorized users must not be able to discern that a particular
     request is using a resource priority mechanism, as that may reveal
     sensitive information about the nature of the request to the
     attacker.  Information not required for request routing should be
     protected end-to-end from intermediate SIP nodes.

     The act of authentication, e.g., by contacting a particular
     server, itself may reveal that a user is requesting prioritized
     service.

     SIP allows protection of header fields not used for request
     routing via S/MIME, while hop-by-hop channel confidentiality can
     be provided by TLS or IPsec.

10.3 Anonymity

  SEC-9: Anonymity: Some users may wish to remain anonymous to the
     request destination.  For the reasons noted earlier, users have to
     authenticate themselves towards the network carrying the request.
     The authentication may be based on capabilities and noms, not
     necessarily their civil name.

     Clearly, they may remain anonymous towards the request
     destination, using the network-asserted identity and general
     privacy mechanisms [7,8].

10.4 Denial-of-Service Attacks

  SEC-10: Denial-of-service: ETS systems are likely to be subject
       to deliberate denial-of-service attacks during certain
       types of emergencies.  DOS attacks may be launched on the
       network itself as well as its authentication and
       authorization mechanism.

  SEC-11: Minimize resource use by unauthorized users: Systems
       should minimize the amount of state, computation and
       network resources that an unauthorized user can command.

  SEC-12: Avoid amplification: The system must not amplify attacks
       by causing the transmission of more than one packet or SIP
       request to a network address whose reachability has not
       been verified.




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11.  Security Considerations

  Section 10 discusses the security issues related to priority
  indication for SIP in detail and derives requirements for the SIP
  indicator.  As discussed in Section 6, identification of priority
  service should avoid multiple concurrent mechanisms, to avoid
  allowing attackers to exploit inconsistent labeling.

12.  Acknowledgements

  Ran Atkinson, Fred Baker, Scott Bradner, Ian Brown, Ken Carlberg,
  Janet Gunn, Kimberly King, Rohan Mahy and James Polk provided helpful
  comments.

13.  Normative References

  [1]  Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., Camarillo, G., Johnston, A.,
       Peterson, J., Sparks, R., Handley, M. and E. Schooler, "SIP:
       Session Initiation Protocol", RFC 3261, June 2002.

14.  Informative References

  [2]  Lennox, J., Schulzrinne, H. and J. Rosenberg, "Common Gateway
       Interface for SIP", RFC 3050, January 2001.

  [3]  Lennox J. and H. Schulzrinne, "CPL: A language for user control
       of internet telephony services", Work in Progress.

  [4]  Zimmerer, E., Peterson, J., Vemuri, A., Ong, L., Audet, F.,
       Watson, M. and M. Zonoun, "MIME media types for ISUP and QSIG
       objects", RFC 3204, December 2001.

  [5]  Vemuri, A. and J. Peterson, "Session Initiation Protocol for
       Telephones (SIP-T): (SIP-T)", BCP 63, RFC 3372, September 2002.

  [6]  Brown, I., "A security framework for emergency communications",
       Work in Progress.

  [7]  Peterson, J., "A Privacy Mechanism for the Session Initiation
       Protocol (SIP)", RFC 3323, November 2002.

  [8]  Watson, M., "Short Term Requirements for Network Asserted
       Identity", RFC 3324, November 2002.








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15.  Author's Address

  Henning Schulzrinne
  Dept. of Computer Science
  Columbia University
  1214 Amsterdam Avenue
  New York, NY 10027
  USA

  EMail: [email protected]









































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16.  Full Copyright Statement

  Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2003).  All Rights Reserved.

  This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
  others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
  or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
  and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any
  kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
  included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this
  document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing
  the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other
  Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of
  developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for
  copyrights defined in the Internet Standards process must be
  followed, or as required to translate it into languages other than
  English.

  The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
  revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.

  This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
  "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING
  TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING
  BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION
  HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
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Acknowledgement

  Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
  Internet Society.



















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