Network Working Group                                         M. Handley
Request for Comments: 2974                                         ACIRI
Category: Experimental                                        C. Perkins
                                                                USC/ISI
                                                              E. Whelan
                                                                    UCL
                                                           October 2000


                    Session Announcement Protocol

Status of this Memo

  This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet
  community.  It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind.
  Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested.
  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

  Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

  This document describes version 2 of the multicast session directory
  announcement protocol, Session Announcement Protocol (SAP), and the
  related issues affecting security and scalability that should be
  taken into account by implementors.

1  Introduction

  In order to assist the advertisement of multicast multimedia
  conferences and other multicast sessions, and to communicate the
  relevant session setup information to prospective participants, a
  distributed session directory may be used.  An instance of such a
  session directory periodically multicasts packets containing a
  description of the session, and these advertisements are received by
  other session directories such that potential remote participants can
  use the session description to start the tools required to
  participate in the session.

  This memo describes the issues involved in the multicast announcement
  of session description information and defines an announcement
  protocol to be used.  Sessions are described using the session
  description protocol which is described in a companion memo [4].






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2  Terminology

  A SAP announcer periodically multicasts an announcement packet to a
  well known multicast address and port.  The announcement is multicast
  with the same scope as the session it is announcing, ensuring that
  the recipients of the announcement are within the scope of the
  session the announcement describes (bandwidth and other such
  constraints permitting).  This is also important for the scalability
  of the protocol, as it keeps local session announcements local.

  A SAP listener learns of the multicast scopes it is within (for
  example, using the Multicast-Scope Zone Announcement Protocol [5])
  and listens on the well known SAP address and port for those scopes.
  In this manner, it will eventually learn of all the sessions being
  announced, allowing those sessions to be joined.

  The key words `MUST', `MUST NOT', `REQUIRED', `SHALL', `SHALL NOT',
  `SHOULD', `SHOULD NOT', `RECOMMENDED', `MAY', and `OPTIONAL' in this
  document are to be interpreted as described in [1].

3  Session Announcement

  As noted previously, a SAP announcer periodically sends an
  announcement packet to a well known multicast address and port.
  There is no rendezvous mechanism - the SAP announcer is not aware of
  the presence or absence of any SAP listeners - and no additional
  reliability is provided over the standard best-effort UDP/IP
  semantics.

  That announcement contains a session description and SHOULD contain
  an authentication header.  The session description MAY be encrypted
  although this is NOT RECOMMENDED (see section 7).

  A SAP announcement is multicast with the same scope as the session it
  is announcing, ensuring that the recipients of the announcement are
  within the scope of the session the announcement describes. There are
  a number of possibilities:

  IPv4 global scope sessions use multicast addresses in the range
     224.2.128.0 - 224.2.255.255 with SAP announcements being sent to
     224.2.127.254 (note that 224.2.127.255 is used by the obsolete
     SAPv0 and MUST NOT be used).









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  IPv4 administrative scope sessions using administratively scoped IP
     multicast as defined in [7].  The multicast address to be used for
     announcements is the highest multicast address in the relevant
     administrative scope zone.  For example, if the scope range is
     239.16.32.0 - 239.16.33.255, then 239.16.33.255 is used for SAP
     announcements.

  IPv6 sessions are announced on the address FF0X:0:0:0:0:0:2:7FFE
     where X is the 4-bit scope value.  For example, an announcement
     for a link-local session assigned the address
     FF02:0:0:0:0:0:1234:5678, should be advertised on SAP address
     FF02:0:0:0:0:0:2:7FFE.

  Ensuring that a description is not used by a potential participant
  outside the session scope is not addressed in this memo.

  SAP announcements MUST be sent on port 9875 and SHOULD be sent with
  an IP time-to-live of 255 (the use of TTL scoping for multicast is
  discouraged [7]).

  If a session uses addresses in multiple administrative scope ranges,
  it is necessary for the announcer to send identical copies of the
  announcement to each administrative scope range.  It is up to the
  listeners to parse such multiple announcements as the same session
  (as identified by the SDP origin field, for example).  The
  announcement rate for each administrative scope range MUST be
  calculated separately, as if the multiple announcements were
  separate.

  Multiple announcers may announce a single session, as an aid to
  robustness in the face of packet loss and failure of one or more
  announcers.  The rate at which each announcer repeats its
  announcement MUST be scaled back such that the total announcement
  rate is equal to that which a single server would choose.
  Announcements made in this manner MUST be identical.

  If multiple announcements are being made for a session, then each
  announcement MUST carry an authentication header signed by the same
  key, or be treated as a completely separate announcement by
  listeners.

  An IPv4 SAP listener SHOULD listen on the IPv4 global scope SAP
  address and on the SAP addresses for each IPv4 administrative scope
  zone it is within.  The discovery of administrative scope zones is
  outside the scope of this memo, but it is assumed that each SAP
  listener within a particular scope zone is aware of that scope zone.
  A SAP listener which supports IPv6 SHOULD also listen to the IPv6 SAP
  addresses.



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3.1 Announcement Interval

  The time period between repetitions of an announcement is chosen such
  that the total bandwidth used by all announcements on a single SAP
  group remains below a preconfigured limit.  If not otherwise
  specified, the bandwidth limit SHOULD be assumed to be 4000 bits per
  second.

  Each announcer is expected to listen to other announcements in order
  to determine the total number of sessions being announced on a
  particular group.  Sessions are uniquely identified by the
  combination of the message identifier hash and originating source
  fields of the SAP header (note that SAP v0 announcers always set the
  message identifier hash to zero, and if such an announcement is
  received the entire message MUST be compared to determine
  uniqueness).

  Announcements are made by periodic multicast to the group.  The base
  interval between announcements is derived from the number of
  announcements being made in that group, the size of the announcement
  and the configured bandwidth limit.  The actual transmission time is
  derived from this base interval as follows:

     1. The announcer initializes the variable tp to be the last time a
        particular announcement was transmitted (or the current time if
        this is the first time this announcement is to be made).

     2. Given a configured bandwidth limit in bits/second and an
        announcement of ad_size bytes, the base announcement interval
        in seconds is

               interval =max(300; (8*no_of_ads*ad_size)/limit)

     3. An offset is calculated based on the base announcement interval

               offset= rand(interval* 2/3)-(interval/3)

     4. The next transmission time for an announcement derived as

               tn =tp+ interval+ offset

  The announcer then sets a timer to expire at tn and waits.  At time
  tn the announcer SHOULD recalculate the next transmission time.  If
  the new value of tn is before the current time, the announcement is
  sent immediately.  Otherwise the transmission is rescheduled for the
  new tn.  This reconsideration prevents transient packet bursts on
  startup and when a network partition heals.




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4  Session Deletion

  Sessions may be deleted in one of several ways:

  Explicit Timeout The session description payload may contain
     timestamp information specifying the start- and end-times of the
     session.  If the current time is later than the end-time of the
     session, then the session SHOULD be deleted from the receiver's
     session cache.

  Implicit Timeout A session announcement message should be received
     periodically for each session description in a receiver's session
     cache.  The announcement period can be predicted by the receiver
     from the set of sessions currently being announced.  If a session
     announcement message has not been received for ten times the
     announcement period, or one hour, whichever is the greater, then
     the session is deleted from the receiver's session cache.  The one
     hour minimum is to allow for transient network partitionings.

  Explicit Deletion A session deletion packet is received specifying
     the session to be deleted.  Session deletion packets SHOULD have a
     valid authentication header, matching that used to authenticate
     previous announcement packets.  If this authentication is missing,
     the deletion message SHOULD be ignored.

5  Session Modification

  A pre-announced session can be modified by simply announcing the
  modified session description.  In this case, the version hash in the
  SAP header MUST be changed to indicate to receivers that the packet
  contents should be parsed (or decrypted and parsed if it is
  encrypted).  The session itself, as distinct from the session
  announcement, is uniquely identified by the payload and not by the
  message identifier hash in the header.

  The same rules apply for session modification as for session
  deletion:

   o Either the modified announcement must contain an authentication
     header signed by the same key as the cached session announcement
     it is modifying, or:

   o The cached session announcement must not contain an authentication
     header, and the session modification announcement must originate
     from the same host as the session it is modifying.






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  If an announcement is received containing an authentication header
  and the cached announcement did not contain an authentication header,
  or it contained a different authentication header, then the modified
  announcement MUST be treated as a new and different announcement, and
  displayed in addition to the un-authenticated announcement.  The same
  should happen if a modified packet without an authentication header
  is received from a different source than the original announcement.

  These rules prevent an announcement having an authentication header
  added by a malicious user and then being deleted using that header,
  and it also prevents a denial-of-service attack by someone putting
  out a spoof announcement which, due to packet loss, reaches some
  participants before the original announcement.  Note that under such
  circumstances, being able to authenticate the message originator is
  the only way to discover which session is the correct session.

   0                   1                   2                   3
   0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
  | V=1 |A|R|T|E|C|   auth len    |         msg id hash           |
  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
  |                                                               |
  :                originating source (32 or 128 bits)            :
  :                                                               :
  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
  |                    optional authentication data               |
  :                              ....                             :
  *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
  |                      optional payload type                    |
  +                                         +-+- - - - - - - - - -+
  |                                         |0|                   |
  + - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - +-+                   |
  |                                                               |
  :                            payload                            :
  |                                                               |
  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

                    Figure 1: Packet format

6  Packet Format

  SAP data packets have the format described in figure 1.

  V: Version Number. The version number field MUST be set to 1 (SAPv2
     announcements which use only SAPv1 features are backwards
     compatible, those which use new features can be detected by other
     means, so the SAP version number doesn't need to change).




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  A: Address type. If the A bit is 0, the originating source field
     contains a 32-bit IPv4 address.  If the A bit is 1, the
     originating source contains a 128-bit IPv6 address.

  R: Reserved. SAP announcers MUST set this to 0, SAP listeners MUST
     ignore the contents of this field.

  T: Message Type. If the T field is set to 0 this is a session
     announcement packet, if 1 this is a session deletion packet.

  E: Encryption Bit. If the encryption bit is set to 1, the payload of
     the SAP packet is encrypted.  If this bit is 0 the packet is not
     encrypted.  See section 7 for details of the encryption process.

  C: Compressed bit. If the compressed bit is set to 1, the payload is
     compressed using the zlib compression algorithm [3].  If the
     payload is to be compressed and encrypted, the compression MUST be
     performed first.

  Authentication Length. An 8 bit unsigned quantity giving the number
     of 32 bit words following the main SAP header that contain
     authentication data.  If it is zero, no authentication header is
     present.

  Authentication data containing a digital signature of the packet,
     with length as specified by the authentication length header
     field.  See section 8 for details of the authentication process.

  Message Identifier Hash. A 16 bit quantity that, used in combination
     with the originating source, provides a globally unique identifier
     indicating the precise version of this announcement.  The choice
     of value for this field is not specified here, except that it MUST
     be unique for each session announced by a particular SAP announcer
     and it MUST be changed if the session description is modified (and
     a session deletion message SHOULD be sent for the old version of
     the session).

     Earlier versions of SAP used a value of zero to mean that the hash
     should be ignored and the payload should always be parsed.  This
     had the unfortunate side-effect that SAP announcers had to study
     the payload data to determine how many unique sessions were being
     advertised, making the calculation of the announcement interval
     more complex that necessary.  In order to decouple the session
     announcement process from the contents of those announcements, SAP
     announcers SHOULD NOT set the message identifier hash to zero.

     SAP listeners MAY silently discard messages if the message
     identifier hash is set to zero.



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  Originating Source. This gives the IP address of the original source
     of the message.  This is an IPv4 address if the A field is set to
     zero, else it is an IPv6 address.  The address is stored in
     network byte order.

     SAPv0 permitted the originating source to be zero if the message
     identifier hash was also zero.  This practise is no longer legal,
     and SAP announcers SHOULD NOT set the originating source to zero.
     SAP listeners MAY silently discard packets with the originating
     source set to zero.

  The header is followed by an optional payload type field and the
  payload data itself.  If the E or C bits are set in the header both
  the payload type and payload are encrypted and/or compressed.

  The payload type field is a MIME content type specifier, describing
  the format of the payload.  This is a variable length ASCII text
  string, followed by a single zero byte (ASCII NUL).  The payload type
  SHOULD be included in all packets.  If the payload type is
  `application/sdp' both the payload type and its terminating zero byte
  MAY be omitted, although this is intended for backwards compatibility
  with SAP v1 listeners only.

  The absence of a payload type field may be noted since the payload
  section of such a packet will start with an SDP `v=0' field, which is
  not a legal MIME content type specifier.

  All implementations MUST support payloads of type `application/sdp'
  [4].  Other formats MAY be supported although since there is no
  negotiation in SAP an announcer which chooses to use a session
  description format other than SDP cannot know that the listeners are
  able to understand the announcement.  A proliferation of payload
  types in announcements has the potential to lead to severe
  interoperability problems, and for this reason, the use of non-SDP
  payloads is NOT RECOMMENDED.

  If the packet is an announcement packet, the payload contains a
  session description.

  If the packet is a session deletion packet, the payload contains a
  session deletion message.  If the payload format is `application/sdp'
  the deletion message is a single SDP line consisting of the origin
  field of the announcement to be deleted.

  It is desirable for the payload to be sufficiently small that SAP
  packets do not get fragmented by the underlying network.
  Fragmentation has a loss multiplier effect, which is known to
  significantly affect the reliability of announcements.  It is



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  RECOMMENDED that SAP packets are smaller than 1kByte in length,
  although if it is known that announcements will use a network with a
  smaller MTU than this, then that SHOULD be used as the maximum
  recommended packet size.

7  Encrypted Announcements

  An announcement is received by all listeners in the scope to which it
  is sent.  If an announcement is encrypted, and many of the receivers
  do not have the encryption key, there is a considerable waste of
  bandwidth since those receivers cannot use the announcement they have
  received.  For this reason, the use of encrypted SAP announcements is
  NOT RECOMMENDED on the global scope SAP group or on administrative
  scope groups which may have many receivers which cannot decrypt those
  announcements.

  The opinion of the authors is that encrypted SAP is useful in special
  cases only, and that the vast majority of scenarios where encrypted
  SAP has been proposed may be better served by distributing session
  details using another mechanism.  There are, however, certain
  scenarios where encrypted announcements may be useful.  For this
  reason, the encryption bit is included in the SAP header to allow
  experimentation with encrypted announcements.

  This memo does not specify details of the encryption algorithm to be
  used or the means by which keys are generated and distributed.  An
  additional specification should define these, if it is desired to use
  encrypted SAP.

  Note that if an encrypted announcement is being announced via a
  proxy, then there may be no way for the proxy to discover that the
  announcement has been superseded, and so it may continue to relay the
  old announcement in addition to the new announcement.  SAP provides
  no mechanism to chain modified encrypted announcements, so it is
  advisable to announce the unmodified session as deleted for a short
  time after the modification has occurred.  This does not guarantee
  that all proxies have deleted the session, and so receivers of
  encrypted sessions should be prepared to discard old versions of
  session announcements that they may receive.  In most cases however,
  the only stateful proxy will be local to (and known to) the sender,
  and an additional (local-area) protocol involving a handshake for
  such session modifications can be used to avoid this problem.

  Session announcements that are encrypted with a symmetric algorithm
  may allow a degree of privacy in the announcement of a session, but
  it should be recognized that a user in possession of such a key can
  pass it on to other users who should not be in possession of such a
  key.  Thus announcements to such a group of key holders cannot be



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  assumed to have come from an authorized key holder unless there is an
  appropriate authentication header signed by an authorized key holder.
  In addition the recipients of such encrypted announcements cannot be
  assumed to only be authorized key holders.  Such encrypted
  announcements do not provide any real security unless all of the
  authorized key holders are trusted to maintain security of such
  session directory keys.  This property is shared by the multicast
  session tools themselves, where it is possible for an un-trustworthy
  member of the session to pass on encryption keys to un-authorized
  users.  However it is likely that keys used for the session tools
  will be more short lived than those used for session directories.

  Similar considerations should apply when session announcements are
  encrypted with an asymmetric algorithm, but then it is possible to
  restrict the possessor(s) of the private key, so that announcements
  to a key-holder group can not be made, even if one of the untrusted
  members of the group proves to be un-trustworthy.

                       1                   2                   3
   0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1
  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
  | V=1 |P| Auth  |                                               |
  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+                                               |
  |              Format  specific authentication subheader        |
  :                        ..................                     :
  +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

   Figure 2:  Format of the authentication data in the SAP header

8  Authenticated Announcements

  The authentication header can be used for two purposes:

   o Verification that changes to a session description or deletion of
     a session are permitted.

   o Authentication of the identity of the session creator.

  In some circumstances only verification is possible because a
  certificate signed by a mutually trusted person or authority is not
  available.  However, under such circumstances, the session originator
  may still be authenticated to be the same as the session originator
  of previous sessions claiming to be from the same person.  This may
  or may not be sufficient depending on the purpose of the session and
  the people involved.






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  Clearly the key used for the authentication should not be trusted to
  belong to the session originator unless it has been separately
  authenticated by some other means, such as being certified by a
  trusted third party.  Such certificates are not normally included in
  an SAP header because they take more space than can normally be
  afforded in an SAP packet, and such verification must therefore take
  place by some other mechanism.  However, as certified public keys are
  normally locally cached, authentication of a particular key only has
  to take place once, rather than every time the session directory
  retransmits the announcement.

  SAP is not tied to any single authentication mechanism.
  Authentication data in the header is self-describing, but the precise
  format depends on the authentication mechanism in use.  The generic
  format of the authentication data is given in figure 2.  The
  structure of the format specific authentication subheader, using both
  the PGP and the CMS formats, is discussed in sections 8.1 and 8.2
  respectively.  Additional formats may be added in future.

  Version Number, V:  The version number of the authentication format
     specified by this memo is 1.

  Padding Bit, P:  If necessary the authentication data is padded to be
     a multiple of 32 bits and the padding bit is set.  In this case
     the last byte of the authentication data contains the number of
     padding bytes (including the last byte) that must be discarded.

  Authentication Type, Auth: The authentication type is a  4 bit
     encoded field that denotes the authentication infrastructure the
     sender expects the recipients to use to check the authenticity and
     integrity of the information.  This defines the format of the
     authentication subheader and can take the values:  0 = PGP format,
     1 = CMS format.  All other values are undefined and SHOULD be
     ignored.

  If a SAP packet is to be compressed or encrypted, this MUST be done
  before the authentication is added.

  The digital signature in the authentication data MUST be calculated
  over the entire packet, including the header.  The authentication
  length MUST be set to zero and the authentication data excluded when
  calculating the digital signature.

  It is to be expected that sessions may be announced by a number of
  different mechanisms, not only SAP.  For example, a session
  description may placed on a web page, sent by email or conveyed in a





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  session initiation protocol.  To ease interoperability with these
  other mechanisms, application level security is employed, rather than
  using IPsec authentication headers.

8.1 PGP Authentication

  A full description of the PGP protocol can be found in [2].  When
  using PGP for SAP authentication the basic format specific
  authentication subheader comprises a digital signature packet as
  described in [2].  The signature type MUST be 0x01 which means the
  signature is that of a canonical text document.

8.2 CMS Authentication

  A full description of the Cryptographic Message Syntax can be found
  in [6].  The format specific authentication subheader will, in the
  CMS case, have an ASN.1 ContentInfo type with the ContentType being
  signedData.

  Use is made of the option available in PKCS#7 to leave the content
  itself blank as the content which is signed is already present in the
  packet.  Inclusion of it within the SignedData type would duplicate
  this data and increase the packet length unnecessarily.  In addition
  this allows recipients with either no interest in the authentication,
  or with no mechanism for checking it, to more easily skip the
  authentication information.

  There SHOULD be only one signerInfo and related fields corresponding
  to the originator of the SAP announcement.  The signingTime SHOULD be
  present as a signedAttribute.  However, due to the strict size
  limitations on the size of SAP packets, certificates and CRLs SHOULD
  NOT be included in the signedData structure.  It is expected that
  users of the protocol will have other methods for certificate and CRL
  distribution.

9  Scalability and caching

  SAP is intended to announce the existence of long-lived wide-area
  multicast sessions.  It is not an especially timely protocol:
  sessions are announced by periodic multicast with a repeat rate on
  the order of tens of minutes, and no enhanced reliability over UDP.
  This leads to a long startup delay before a complete set of
  announcements is heard by a listener.  This delay is clearly
  undesirable for interactive browsing of announced sessions.

  In order to reduce the delays inherent in SAP, it is recommended that
  proxy caches are deployed.  A SAP proxy cache is expected to listen
  to all SAP groups in its scope, and to maintain an up-to-date list of



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  all announced sessions along with the time each announcement was last
  received.  When a new SAP listeners starts, it should contact its
  local proxy to download this information, which is then sufficient
  for it to process future announcements directly, as if it has been
  continually listening.

  The protocol by which a SAP listener contacts its local proxy cache
  is not specified here.

10 Security Considerations

  SAP contains mechanisms for ensuring integrity of session
  announcements, for authenticating the origin of an announcement and
  for encrypting such announcements (sections 7 and 8).

  As stated in section 5, if a session modification announcement is
  received that contains a valid authentication header, but which is
  not signed by the original creator of the session, then the session
  must be treated as a new session in addition to the original session
  with the same SDP origin information unless the originator of one of
  the session descriptions can be authenticated using a certificate
  signed by a trusted third party.  If this were not done, there would
  be a possible denial of service attack whereby a party listens for
  new announcements, strips off the original authentication header,
  modifies the session description, adds a new authentication header
  and re-announces the session.  If a rule was imposed that such spoof
  announcements were ignored, then if packet loss or late starting of a
  session directory instance caused the original announcement to fail
  to arrive at a site, but the spoof announcement did so, this would
  then prevent the original announcement from being accepted at that
  site.

  A similar denial-of-service attack is possible if a session
  announcement receiver relies completely on the originating source and
  hash fields to indicate change, and fails to parse the remainder of
  announcements for which it has seen the origin/hash combination
  before.

  A denial of service attack is possible from a malicious site close to
  a legitimate site which is making a session announcement.  This can
  happen if the malicious site floods the legitimate site with huge
  numbers of (illegal) low TTL announcements describing high TTL
  sessions.  This may reduce the session announcement rate of the
  legitimate announcement to below a tenth of the rate expected at
  remote sites and therefore cause the session to time out.  Such an
  attack is likely to be easily detectable, and we do not provide any
  mechanism here to prevent it.




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A. Summary of differences between SAPv0 and SAPv1

  For this purpose SAPv0 is defined as the protocol in use by version
  2.2 of the session directory tool, sdr.  SAPv1 is the protocol
  described in the 19 November 1996 version of this memo.  The packet
  headers of SAP messages are the same in V0 and V1 in that a V1 tool
  can parse a V0 announcement header but not vice-versa.  In SAPv0, the
  fields have the following values:

    o Version Number:  0

    o Message Type:  0 (Announcement)

    o Authentication Type:  0 (No Authentication)

    o Encryption Bit:  0 (No Encryption)

    o Compression Bit:  0 (No compression)

    o Message Id Hash:  0 (No Hash Specified)

    o Originating Source:  0 (No source specified, announcement has
      not been relayed)

B. Summary of differences between SAPv1 and SAPv2

  The packet headers of SAP messages are the same in V1 and V2 in that
  a V2 tool can parse a V1 announcement header but not necessarily
  vice-versa.

   o The A bit has been added to the SAP header, replacing one of the
     bits of the SAPv1 message type field.  If set to zero the
     announcement is of an IPv4 session, and the packet is backwards
     compatible with SAPv1.  If set to one the announcement is of an
     IPv6 session, and SAPv1 listeners (which do not support IPv6) will
     see this as an illegal message type (MT) field.

   o The second bit of the message type field in SAPv1 has been
     replaced by a reserved, must-be-zero, bit.  This bit was unused in
     SAPv1, so this change just codifies existing usage.

   o SAPv1 specified encryption of the payload.  SAPv2 includes the E
     bit in the SAP header to indicate that the payload is encrypted,
     but does not specify any details of the encryption.

   o SAPv1 allowed the message identifier hash and originating source
     fields to be set to zero, for backwards compatibility.  This is no
     longer legal.



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   o SAPv1 specified gzip compression.  SAPv2 uses zlib (the only known
     implementation of SAP compression used zlib, and gzip compression
     was a mistake).

   o SAPv2 provides a more complete specification for authentication.

   o SAPv2 allows for non-SDP payloads to be transported.  SAPv1
     required that the payload was SDP.

   o SAPv1 included a timeout field for encrypted announcement, SAPv2
     does not (and relies of explicit deletion messages or implicit
     timeouts).

C. Acknowledgements

  SAP and SDP were originally based on the protocol used by the sd
  session directory from Van Jacobson at LBNL.  Version 1 of SAP was
  designed by Mark Handley as part of the European Commission MICE
  (Esprit 7602) and MERCI (Telematics 1007) projects.  Version 2
  includes authentication features developed by Edmund Whelan, Goli
  Montasser-Kohsari and Peter Kirstein as part of the European
  Commission ICE-TEL project (Telematics 1005), and support for IPv6
  developed by Maryann P. Maher and Colin Perkins.




























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RFC 2974             Session Announcement Protocol          October 2000


D. Authors' Addresses

  Mark Handley
  AT&T Center for Internet Research at ICSI,
  International Computer Science Institute,
  1947 Center Street, Suite 600,
  Berkeley, CA 94704, USA

  EMail: [email protected]


  Colin Perkins
  USC Information Sciences Institute
  4350 N. Fairfax Drive, Suite 620
  Arlington, VA 22203, USA

  EMail: [email protected]


  Edmund Whelan
  Department of Computer Science,
  University College London,
  Gower Street,
  London, WC1E 6BT, UK

  EMail: [email protected]

























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RFC 2974             Session Announcement Protocol          October 2000


References

  [1] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to indicate requirement
      levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

  [2] Callas, J., Donnerhacke, L., Finney, H. and R. Thayer. "OpenPGP
      message format", RFC 2440, November 1998.

  [3] Deutsch, P. and J.-L. Gailly, "Zlib compressed data format
      specification version 3.3", RFC 1950, May 1996.

  [4] Handley, M. and V. Jacobson, "SDP: Session Description Protocol",
      RFC 2327, April 1998.

  [5] Handley, M., Thaler, D. and R. Kermode, "Multicast-scope zone
      announcement protocol (MZAP)", RFC 2776, February 2000.

  [6] Housley, R., "Cryptographic message syntax", RFC 2630, June 1999.

  [7] Mayer, D., "Administratively scoped IP multicast", RFC 2365, July
      1998.






























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Full Copyright Statement

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  This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
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  or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
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  The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
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  This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
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Acknowledgement

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



















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