Network Working Group                                          P. Savola
Request for Comments: 4459                                     CSC/FUNET
Category: Informational                                       April 2006


      MTU and Fragmentation Issues with In-the-Network Tunneling

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 (2006).

Abstract

  Tunneling techniques such as IP-in-IP when deployed in the middle of
  the network, typically between routers, have certain issues regarding
  how large packets can be handled: whether such packets would be
  fragmented and reassembled (and how), whether Path MTU Discovery
  would be used, or how this scenario could be operationally avoided.
  This memo justifies why this is a common, non-trivial problem, and
  goes on to describe the different solutions and their characteristics
  at some length.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction ....................................................2
  2. Problem Statement ...............................................3
  3. Description of Solutions ........................................4
     3.1. Fragmentation and Reassembly by the Tunnel Endpoints .......4
     3.2. Signalling the Lower MTU to the Sources ....................5
     3.3. Encapsulate Only When There is Free MTU ....................6
     3.4. Fragmentation of the Inner Packet ..........................8
  4. Conclusions .....................................................9
  5. Security Considerations ........................................10
  6. Acknowledgements ...............................................11
  7. References .....................................................11
     7.1. Normative References ......................................11
     7.2. Informative References ....................................12








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1.  Introduction

  A large number of ways to encapsulate datagrams in other packets,
  i.e., tunneling mechanisms, have been specified over the years: for
  example, IP-in-IP (e.g., [1] [2], [3]), Generic Routing Encapsulation
  (GRE) [4], Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) [5], or IP Security
  (IPsec) [6] in tunnel mode -- any of which might run on top of IPv4,
  IPv6, or some other protocol and carrying the same or a different
  protocol.

  All of these can be run so that the endpoints of the inner protocol
  are co-located with the endpoints of the outer protocol; in a typical
  scenario, this would correspond to "host-to-host" tunneling.  It is
  also possible to have one set of endpoints co-located, i.e.,
  host-to-router or router-to-host tunneling.  Finally, many of these
  mechanisms are also employed between the routers for all or a part of
  the traffic that passes between them, resulting in router-to-router
  tunneling.

  All these protocols and scenarios have one issue in common: how does
  the source select the maximum packet size so that the packets will
  fit, even encapsulated, in the smallest Maximum Transmission Unit
  (MTU) of the traversed path in the network; and if you cannot affect
  the packet sizes, what do you do to be able to encapsulate them in
  any case?  The four main solutions are as follows (these will be
  elaborated in Section 3):

  1.  Fragmenting all too big encapsulated packets to fit in the paths,
      and reassembling them at the tunnel endpoints.

  2.  Signal to all the sources whose traffic must be encapsulated, and
      is larger than fits, to send smaller packets, e.g., using Path
      MTU Discovery (PMTUD)[7][8].

  3.  Ensure that in the specific environment, the encapsulated packets
      will fit in all the paths in the network, e.g., by using MTU
      bigger than 1500 in the backbone used for encapsulation.

  4.  Fragmenting the original too big packets so that their fragments
      will fit, even encapsulated, in the paths, and reassembling them
      at the destination nodes.  Note that this approach is only
      available for IPv4 under certain assumptions (see Section 3.4).

  It is also common to run multiple layers of encapsulation, for
  example, GRE or L2TP over IPsec; with nested tunnels in the network,
  the tunnel endpoints can be the same or different, and both the inner
  and outer tunnels may have different MTU handling strategies.  In




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  particular, signalling may be a scalable option for the outer tunnel
  or tunnels if the number of innermost tunnel endpoints is limited.

  The tunneling packet size issues are relatively straightforward in
  host-to-host tunneling or host-to-router tunneling where Path MTU
  Discovery only needs to signal to one source node.  The issues are
  significantly more difficult in router-to-router and certain
  router-to-host scenarios, which are the focus of this memo.

  It is worth noting that most of this discussion applies to a more
  generic case, where there exists a link with a lower MTU in the path.
  A concrete and widely deployed example of this is the usage of PPP
  over Ethernet (PPPoE) [11] at the customers' access link.  These
  lower-MTU links, and particularly PPPoE links, are typically not
  deployed in topologies where fragmentation and reassembly might be
  unfeasible (e.g., a backbone), so this may be a slightly easier
  problem.  However, this more generic case is considered out of scope
  of this memo.

  There are also known challenges in specifying and implementing a
  mechanism that would be used at the tunnel endpoint to obtain the
  best suitable packet size to use for encapsulation: if a static value
  is chosen, a lot of fragmentation might end up being performed.  On
  the other hand, if PMTUD is used, the implementation would need to
  update the discovered interface MTU based on the ICMP Packet Too Big
  messages and originate ICMP Packet Too Big message(s) back to the
  source(s) of the encapsulated packets; this also assumes that
  sufficient data has been piggybacked on the ICMP messages (beyond the
  required 64 bits after the IPv4 header).  We'll discuss using PMTUD
  to signal the sources briefly in Section 3.2, but in-depth
  specification and analysis are described elsewhere (e.g., in [4] and
  [2]) and are out of scope of this memo.

  Section 2 includes a problem statement, section 3 describes the
  different solutions with their drawbacks and advantages, and section
  4 presents conclusions.

2.  Problem Statement

  It is worth considering why exactly this is considered a problem.

  It is possible to fix all the packet size issues using solution 1,
  fragmenting the resulting encapsulated packet, and reassembling it by
  the tunnel endpoint.  However, this is considered problematic for at
  least three reasons, as described in Section 3.1.

  Therefore, it is desirable to avoid fragmentation and reassembly if
  possible.  On the other hand, the other solutions may not be



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  practical either: especially in router-to-router or router-to-host
  tunneling, Path MTU Discovery might be very disadvantageous --
  consider the case where a backbone router would send ICMP Packet Too
  Big messages to every source that would try to send packets through
  it.  Fragmenting before encapsulation is also not available in IPv6,
  and not available when the Don't Fragment (DF) bit has been set (see
  Section 3.4 for more).  Ensuring a high enough MTU so encapsulation
  is always possible is of course a valid approach, but requires
  careful operational planning, and may not be a feasible assumption
  for implementors.

  This yields that there is no trivial solution to this problem, and it
  needs to be further explored to consider the trade offs, as is done
  in this memo.

3.  Description of Solutions

  This section describes the potential solutions in a bit more detail.

3.1.  Fragmentation and Reassembly by the Tunnel Endpoints

  The seemingly simplest solution to tunneling packet size issues is
  fragmentation of the outer packet by the encapsulator and reassembly
  by the decapsulator.  However, this is highly problematic for at
  least three reasons:

  o  Fragmentation causes overhead: every fragment requires the IP
     header (20 or 40 bytes), and with IPv6, an additional 8 bytes for
     the Fragment Header.

  o  Fragmentation and reassembly require computation: splitting
     datagrams to fragments is a non-trivial procedure, and so is their
     reassembly.  For example, software router forwarding
     implementations may not be able to perform these operations at
     line rate.

  o  At the time of reassembly, all the information (i.e., all the
     fragments) is normally not available; when the first fragment
     arrives to be reassembled, a buffer of the maximum possible size
     may have to be allocated because the total length of the
     reassembled datagram is not known at that time.  Furthermore, as
     fragments might get lost, or be reordered or delayed, the
     reassembly engine has to wait with the partial packet for some
     time (e.g., 60 seconds [9]).  When this would have to be done at
     the line rate, with, for example 10 Gbit/s speed, the length of
     the buffers that reassembly might require would be prohibitive.





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  When examining router-to-router tunneling, the third problem is
  likely the worst; certainly, a hardware computation and
  implementation requirement would also be significant, but not all
  that difficult in the end -- and the link capacity wasted in the
  backbones by additional overhead might not be a huge problem either.

  However, IPv4 identification header length is only 16 bits (compared
  to 32 bits in IPv6), and if a larger number of packets are being
  tunneled between two IP addresses, the ID is very likely to wrap and
  cause data misassociation.  This reassembly wrongly combining data
  from two unrelated packets causes data integrity and potentially a
  confidentiality violation.  This problem is further described in
  [12].

  IPv6, and IPv4 with the DF bit set in the encapsulating header,
  allows the tunnel endpoints to optimize the tunnel MTU and minimize
  network-based reassembly.  This also prevents fragmentation of the
  encapsulated packets on the tunnel path.  If the IPv4 encapsulating
  header does not have the DF bit set, the tunnel endpoints will have
  to perform a significant amount of fragmentation and reassembly,
  while the use of PMTUD is minimized.

  As Appendix A describes, the MTU of the tunnel is also a factor on
  which packets require fragmentation and reassembly; the worst case
  occurs if the tunnel MTU is "infinite" or equal to the physical
  interface MTUs.

  So, if reassembly could be made to work sufficiently reliably, this
  would be one acceptable fallback solution but only for IPv6.

3.2.  Signalling the Lower MTU to the Sources

  Another approach is to use techniques like Path MTU Discovery (or
  potentially a future derivative [13]) to signal to the sources whose
  packets will be encapsulated in the network to send smaller packets
  so that they can be encapsulated; in particular, when done on
  routers, this includes two separable functions:

  a.  Forwarding behaviour: when forwarding packets, if the IPv4-only
      DF bit is set, the router sends an ICMP Packet Too Big message to
      the source if the MTU of the egress link is too small.

  b.  Router's "host" behaviour: when the router receives an ICMP
      Packet Too Big message related to a tunnel, it (1) adjusts the
      tunnel MTU, and (2) originates an ICMP Packet Too Big message to
      the source address of the encapsulated packet. (2) can be done
      either immediately or by waiting for the next packet to trigger
      an ICMP; the former minimizes the packet loss due to MTU changes.



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  Note that this only works if the MTU of the tunnel is of reasonable
  size, and not, for example, 64 kilobytes: see Appendix A for more.

  This approach would presuppose that PMTUD works.  While it is
  currently working for IPv6, and critical for its operation, there is
  ample evidence that in IPv4, PMTUD is far from reliable due to, for
  example firewalls and other boxes being configured to inappropriately
  drop all the ICMP packets [14], or software bugs rendering PMTUD
  inoperational.

  Furthermore, there are two scenarios where signalling from the
  network would be highly undesirable.  The first is when the
  encapsulation would be done in such a prominent place in the network
  that a very large number of sources would need to be signalled with
  this information (possibly even multiple times, depending on how long
  they keep their PMTUD state).  The second is when the encapsulation
  is done for passive monitoring purposes (network management, lawful
  interception, etc.) -- when it's critical that the sources whose
  traffic is being encapsulated are not aware of this happening.

  When desiring to avoid fragmentation, IPv4 requires one of two
  alternatives [1]: copy the DF bit from the inner packets to the
  encapsulating header, or always set the DF bit of the outer header.
  The latter is better, especially in controlled environments, because
  it forces PMTUD to converge immediately.

  A related technique, which works with TCP under specific scenarios
  only, is so-called "MSS clamping".  With that technique or rather a
  "hack", the TCP packets' Maximum Segment Size (MSS) is reduced by
  tunnel endpoints so that the TCP connection automatically restricts
  itself to the maximum available packet size.  Obviously, this does
  not work for UDP or other protocols that have no MSS.  This approach
  is most applicable and used with PPPoE, but could be applied
  otherwise as well; the approach also assumes that all the traffic
  goes through tunnel endpoints that do MSS clamping -- this is trivial
  for the single-homed access links, but could be a challenge
  otherwise.

  A new approach to PMTUD is in the works [13], but it is uncertain
  whether that would fix the problems -- at least not the passive
  monitoring requirements.

3.3.  Encapsulate Only When There is Free MTU

  The third approach is an operational one, depending on the
  environment where encapsulation and decapsulation are being
  performed.  That is, if an ISP would deploy tunneling in its
  backbone, which would consist only of links supporting high MTUs



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  (e.g., Gigabit Ethernet or SDH/SONET), but all its customers and
  peers would have a lower MTU (e.g., 1500, or the backbone MTU minus
  the encapsulation overhead), this would imply that no packets (with
  the encapsulation overhead added) would have a larger MTU than the
  "backbone MTU", and all the encapsulated packets would always fit
  MTU-wise in the backbone links.

  This approach is highly assumptive of the deployment scenario.  It
  may be desirable to build a tunnel to/from another ISP, for example,
  where this might no longer hold; or there might be links in the
  network that cannot support the higher MTUs to satisfy the tunneling
  requirements; or the tunnel might be set up directly between the
  customer and the ISP, in which case fragmentation would occur, with
  tunneled fragments terminating on the ISP and thus requiring
  reassembly capability from the ISP's equipment.

  To restate, this approach can only be considered when tunneling is
  done inside a part of specific kind of ISP's own network, not, for
  example, transiting an ISP.

  Another, related approach might be having the sources use only a low
  enough MTU that would fit in all the physical MTUs; for example, IPv6
  specifies the minimum MTU of 1280 bytes.  For example, if all the
  sources whose traffic would be encapsulated would use this as the
  maximum packet size, there would probably always be enough free MTU
  for encapsulation in the network.  However, this is not the case
  today, and it would be completely unrealistic to assume that this
  kind of approach could be made to work in general.

  It is worth remembering that while the IPv6 minimum MTU is 1280 bytes
  [10], there are scenarios where the tunnel implementation must
  implement fragmentation and reassembly [3]: for example, when having
  an IPv6-in-IPv6 tunnel on top of a physical interface with an MTU of
  1280 bytes, or when having two layers of IPv6 tunneling.  This can
  only be avoided by ensuring that links on top of which IPv6 is being
  tunneled have a somewhat larger MTU (e.g., 40 bytes) than 1280 bytes.
  This conclusion can be generalized: because IP can be tunneled on top
  of IP, no single minimum or maximum MTU can be found such that
  fragmentation or signalling to the sources would never be needed.

  All in all, while in certain operational environments it might be
  possible to avoid any problems by deployment choices, or limiting the
  MTU that the sources use, this is probably not a sufficiently good
  general solution for the equipment vendors.  Other solutions must
  also be provided.






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3.4.  Fragmentation of the Inner Packet

  A final possibility is fragmenting the inner packet, before
  encapsulation, in such a manner that the encapsulated packet fits in
  the tunnel's path MTU (discovered using PMTUD).  However, one should
  note that only IPv4 supports this "in-flight" fragmentation;
  furthermore, it isn't allowed for packets where the Don't Fragment
  bit has been set.  Even if one could ignore IPv6 completely, so many
  IPv4 host stacks send packets with the DF bit set that this would
  seem unfeasible.

  However, there are existing implementations that violate the standard
  that:

  o  discard too big packets with the DF bit not set instead of
     fragmenting them (this is rare);

  o  ignore the DF bit completely, for all or specified interfaces; or

  o  clear the DF bit before encapsulation, in the egress of configured
     interfaces.  This is typically done for all the traffic, not just
     too big packets (allowing configuring this is common).

  This is non-compliant behaviour, but there are certainly uses for it,
  especially in certain tightly controlled passive monitoring
  scenarios, and it has potential for more generic applicability as
  well, to work around PMTUD issues.

  Clearing the DF bit effectively disables the sender's PMTUD for the
  path beyond the tunnel.  This may result in fragmentation later in
  the network, but as the packets have already been fragmented prior to
  encapsulation, this fragmentation later on does not make matters
  significantly worse.

  As this is an implemented and desired (by some) behaviour, the full
  impacts e.g., for the functioning of PMTUD (for example) should be
  analyzed, and the use of fragmentation-related IPv4 bits should be
  re-evaluated.

  In summary, this approach provides a relatively easy fix for IPv4
  problems, with potential for causing problems for PMTUD; as this
  would not work with IPv6, it could not be considered a generic
  solution.








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4.  Conclusions

  Fragmentation and reassembly by the tunnel endpoints are a clear and
  simple solution to the problem, but the hardware reassembly when the
  packets get lost may face significant implementation challenges that
  may be insurmountable.  This approach does not seem feasible,
  especially for IPv4 with high data rates due to problems with
  wrapping the fragment identification field [12].  Constant wrapping
  may occur when the data rate is in the order of MB/s for IPv4 and in
  the order of dozens of GB/s for IPv6.  However, this reassembly
  approach is probably not a problem for passive monitoring
  applications.

  PMTUD techniques, at least at the moment and especially for IPv4,
  appear to be too unreliable or unscalable to be used in the
  backbones.  It is an open question whether a future solution might
  work better in this aspect.

  It is clear that in some environments the operational approach to the
  problem, ensuring that fragmentation is never necessary by keeping
  higher MTUs in the networks where encapsulated packets traverse, is
  sufficient.  But this is unlikely to be enough in general, and for
  vendors that may not be able to make assumptions about the operators'
  deployments.

  Fragmentation of the inner packet is only possible with IPv4, and is
  sufficient only if standards-incompliant behaviour, with potential
  for bad side-effects (e.g., for PMTUD), is adopted.  It should not be
  used if there are alternatives; fragmentation of the outer packet
  seems a better option for passive monitoring.

  However, if reassembly in the network must be avoided, there are
  basically two possibilities:

  1.  For IPv6, use ICMP signalling or operational methods.

  2.  For IPv4, packets for which the DF bit is not set can be
      fragmented before encapsulation (and the encapsulating header
      would have the DF bit set); packets whose DF bit is set would
      need to get the DF bit cleared (though this is non-compliant).
      This also minimizes the need for (unreliable) Internet-wide
      PMTUD.

  An interesting thing to explicitly note is that when tunneling is
  done in a high-speed backbone, typically one may be able to make
  assumptions on the environment; however, when reassembly is not
  performed in such a network, it might be done in software or with
  lower requirements, and there exists either a reassembly



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  implementation using PMTUD or using a separate approach for passive
  monitoring -- so this might not be a real problem.

  In consequence, the critical questions at this point appear to be 1)
  whether a higher MTU can be assumed in the high-speed networks that
  deploy tunneling, and 2) whether "slower-speed" networks could cope
  with a software-based reassembly, a less capable hardware-based
  reassembly, or the other workarounds.  An important future task would
  be analyzing the observed incompliant behaviour about the DF bit to
  note whether it has any unanticipated drawbacks.

5.  Security Considerations

  This document describes different issues with packet sizes and in-
  the-network tunneling; this does not have security considerations on
  its own.

  However, different solutions might have characteristics that may make
  them more susceptible to attacks -- for example, a router-based
  fragment reassembly could easily lead to (reassembly) buffer memory
  exhaustion if the attacker sends a sufficient number of fragments
  without sending all of them, so that the reassembly would be stalled
  until a timeout; these and other fragment attacks (e.g., [15]) have
  already been used against, for example, firewalls and host stacks,
  and need to be taken into consideration in the implementations.

  It is worth considering the cryptographic expense (which is typically
  more significant than the reassembly, if done in software) with
  fragmentation of the inner or outer packet.  If an outer fragment
  goes missing, no cryptographic operations have been yet performed; if
  an inner fragment goes missing, cryptographic operations have already
  been performed.  Therefore, which of these approaches is preferable
  also depends on whether cryptography or reassembly is already
  provided in hardware; for high-speed routers, at least, one should be
  able to assume that if it is performing relatively heavy
  cryptography, hardware support is already required.

  The solutions using PMTUD (and consequently ICMP) will also need to
  take into account the attacks using ICMP.  In particular, an attacker
  could send ICMP Packet Too Big messages indicating a very low MTU to
  reduce the throughput and/or as a fragmentation/reassembly
  denial-of-service attack.  This attack has been described in the
  context of TCP in [16].








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6.  Acknowledgements

  While the topic is far from new, recent discussions with W. Mark
  Townsley on L2TP fragmentation issues caused the author to sit down
  and write up the issues in general.  Michael Richardson and Mika
  Joutsenvirta provided useful feedback on the first version.  When
  soliciting comments from the NANOG list, Carsten Bormann, Kevin
  Miller, Warren Kumari, Iljitsch van Beijnum, Alok Dube, and Stephen
  J. Wilcox provided useful feedback.  Later, Carlos Pignataro provided
  excellent input, helping to improve the document.  Joe Touch also
  provided input on the memo.

7.  References

7.1.  Normative References

  [1]   Perkins, C., "IP Encapsulation within IP", RFC 2003, October
        1996.

  [2]   Nordmark, E. and R. Gilligan, "Basic Transition Mechanisms for
        IPv6 Hosts and Routers", RFC 4213, October 2005.

  [3]   Conta, A. and S. Deering, "Generic Packet Tunneling in IPv6
        Specification", RFC 2473, December 1998.

  [4]   Farinacci, D., Li, T., Hanks, S., Meyer, D., and P. Traina,
        "Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE)", RFC 2784, March 2000.

  [5]   Lau, J., Townsley, M., and I. Goyret, "Layer Two Tunneling
        Protocol - Version 3 (L2TPv3)", RFC 3931, March 2005.

  [6]   Kent, S. and K. Seo, "Security Architecture for the Internet
        Protocol", RFC 4301, December 2005.

  [7]   Mogul, J. and S. Deering, "Path MTU discovery", RFC 1191,
        November 1990.

  [8]   McCann, J., Deering, S., and J. Mogul, "Path MTU Discovery for
        IP version 6", RFC 1981, August 1996.

  [9]   Braden, R., "Requirements for Internet Hosts - Communication
        Layers", STD 3, RFC 1122, October 1989.

  [10]  Deering, S. and R. Hinden, "Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6)
        Specification", RFC 2460, December 1998.






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7.2.  Informative References

  [11]  Mamakos, L., Lidl, K., Evarts, J., Carrel, D., Simone, D., and
        R. Wheeler, "A Method for Transmitting PPP Over Ethernet
        (PPPoE)", RFC 2516, February 1999.

  [12]  Mathis, M., "Fragmentation Considered Very Harmful", Work in
        Progress, July 2004.

  [13]  Mathis, M. and J. Heffner, "Path MTU Discovery", Work in
        Progress, March 2006.

  [14]  Medina, A., Allman, M., and S. Floyd, "Measuring the Evolution
        of Transport Protocols in the Internet", Computer
        Communications Review, Apr 2005, <http://www.icir.org/tbit/>.

  [15]  Miller, I., "Protection Against a Variant of the Tiny Fragment
        Attack (RFC 1858)", RFC 3128, June 2001.

  [16]  Gont, F., "ICMP attacks against TCP", Work in Progress,
        February 2006.






























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Appendix A.  MTU of the Tunnel

  Different tunneling mechanisms may treat the tunnel links as having
  different kinds of MTU values.  Some might use the same default MTU
  as for other interfaces; some others might use the default MTU minus
  the expected IP overhead (e.g., 20, 28, or 40 bytes); some others
  might even treat the tunnel as having an "infinite MTU", e.g., 64
  kilobytes.

  As [2] describes, having an infinite MTU, i.e., always fragmenting
  the outer packet (and never the inner packet) and never performing
  PMTUD for the tunnel path, is a very bad idea, especially in
  host-to-router scenarios.  (It could be argued that if the nodes are
  sure that this is a host-to-host tunnel, a larger MTU might make
  sense if fragmentation and reassembly are more efficient than just
  sending properly sized packets -- but this seems like a stretch.)

Author's Address

  Pekka Savola
  CSC/FUNET
  Espoo
  Finland

  EMail: [email protected]


























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Full Copyright Statement

  Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006).

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