Independent Submission C. Pignataro Request for Comments: 6592 Cisco Category: Informational 1 April 2012 ISSN: 2070-1721
The Null Packet
Abstract
The ever-elusive Null Packet received numerous mentions in documents in the RFC series, but it has never been explicitly defined. This memo corrects that omission.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is published for informational purposes.
This is a contribution to the RFC Series, independently of any other RFC stream. The RFC Editor has chosen to publish this document at its discretion and makes no statement about its value for implementation or deployment. Documents approved for publication by the RFC Editor are not a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6592.
Copyright Notice
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Null Packets are neither sent nor acknowledged when not received. They are perfect in their simplicity and they are very true, as they extrapolate from the twelfth Truth of networking [RFC1925]: there is *literally* nothing left to take away.
An early mention of the Null Packet is attributed to Van Jacobson in the context of TCP/IP Header Compression [RFC1144]. Mind you, the Null Packet is not created by compressing a packet until it disappears into nothingness. Such a compression scheme might not be reversible; instead, Section 3.2.4 of [RFC1144] describes an explicit lack of response as "Nothing (a null packet) is returned".
Many documents attempt to define in-the-wire code points and protocol identifiers (PIDs) for a Null Packet [RFC4259] [RFC4571] [RFC5320]. However, such an exercise is futile. This memo postulates that a Null Packet cannot have a PID, as the existence of a protocol construct or value would null the null; this includes the inability to use 0x0, 0x0000, or even 0x00000000, but excludes the restriction to use "" (see Section 2.1).
An IPv6 Next Header value of 59 (No Next Header) (see Section 4.7 of [RFC2460]) does not create a Null Packet.
Many experts naively confuse the Null Packet with an Imaginary Packet, in a rationalization attempt when faced with the inability to prove the existence of the Null Packet. For reference, an Imaginary Packet contains the IP Version of 4i or 6i. However, protocol purists are not fooled and quickly plea with experts to get real.
The Null Packet's qualities should not be confused with the bit- bucket blackhole nature of the null device, since the Null Packet does not discard packets. Confusion might stem from the fact that the behavior is similar to that of input streams reading from /dev/ null (i.e., "nothing is returned").
A protocol sending Null Packets effectively sends packets of zero length. One characteristic of flow streams of Null Packet traffic is that increasing the rate at which Null Packets are sent does not increase the bit rate of the Null Packet traffic. The bit rate continues being unequivocally null, unless an infinite number of Null Packets per unit of time could be sent. Similarly, should a user stop sending Null Packets, the bit rate of Null Packets would not vary. Traditional traffic performance metrics are not well suited to qualify Null Packet traffic; this fact argues for the creation of new sets of performance metrics that test positive for "usefulness" (see Section 5.2 of [RFC6390]).
When used in a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) environment, the Null Packet can only use an Implicit NULL label (see Section 4.1.5 of [RFC3031]. The Implicit NULL label is a label that can be distributed, but which never actually appears in the encapsulation. The Nil FEC is not used.
The security considerations for the Null Packet are undefined, as hereby described. The "good" nature of Null Packets is quite useless, and the "bad" nature of Null Packets is rather inefficient.
Many firewalls and other security devices have trouble identifying the Null Packet. Others claim to filter out Null Packets quite effectively and effortlessly. Interestingly, or not, both might be correct, which begs the omnipotence paradox: Can a firewall create a rule to filter out the Null Packet coming from the "outside", and not see Null Packets being allowed on the "inside"?
The Null Packet cannot have the Evil Bit ("E") [RFC3514] set, by definition (see Section 2.1). Consequently, it is rather clear and undeniable that the Null Packet is harmless, having no evil intent.
A commonly accepted practice for Security Considerations sections is to wrap a blanket "encrypt around foo" statement, for almost any value of "foo". This document is no exception. However, surgical care must be taken to not apply NULL encryption [RFC2410] to the Null Packet; such a careless act can bring discontinuities and "Oops" more epic than dividing by zero or Googling the word "Google" (it has been rumored that such action can break the Internet, although this can be easily disproved by reductio ad absurdum.)
Even when sysadmins, netadmins, secadmins, and other NOC engineers are faced with the undisputed inability to block Null Packets (see Section 4.1), attacks leveraging Null Packets are not quite so common in the wild and are not seen in the seek^Wsecurity news. Perhaps because these unusual packets are hard to spoof in the data plane, or because their Time to Live (TTL) or Hop Limit cannot be altered since it does not exist [RFC5082], the fact is that Null Packets present a denial of denial of service (DoDoS).
An important corollary is that dropping Null Packets does not generate packets.
[RFC2410] Glenn, R. and S. Kent, "The NULL Encryption Algorithm and Its Use With IPsec", RFC 2410, November 1998.
[RFC2460] Deering, S. and R. Hinden, "Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification", RFC 2460, December 1998.
[RFC3031] Rosen, E., Viswanathan, A., and R. Callon, "Multiprotocol Label Switching Architecture", RFC 3031, January 2001.
[RFC4259] Montpetit, M., Fairhurst, G., Clausen, H., Collini-Nocker, B., and H. Linder, "A Framework for Transmission of IP Datagrams over MPEG-2 Networks", RFC 4259, November 2005.
[RFC4571] Lazzaro, J., "Framing Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) and RTP Control Protocol (RTCP) Packets over Connection- Oriented Transport", RFC 4571, July 2006.
[RFC5082] Gill, V., Heasley, J., Meyer, D., Savola, P., and C. Pignataro, "The Generalized TTL Security Mechanism (GTSM)", RFC 5082, October 2007.
[RFC5320] Templin, F., "The Subnetwork Encapsulation and Adaptation Layer (SEAL)", RFC 5320, February 2010.
[RFC6390] Clark, A. and B. Claise, "Guidelines for Considering New Performance Metric Development", BCP 170, RFC 6390, October 2011.
Pignataro Informational [Page 5]
RFC 6592 The Null Packet 1 April 2012
Author's Address
Carlos Pignataro Cisco Systems, Inc. 7200-12 Kit Creek Road Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 US