Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) R. Penno Request for Comments: 7857 Cisco BCP: 127 S. Perreault Updates: 4787, 5382, 5508 Jive Communications Category: Best Current Practice M. Boucadair, Ed. ISSN: 2070-1721 Orange S. Sivakumar Cisco K. Naito NTT April 2016
Updates to Network Address Translation (NAT) Behavioral Requirements
Abstract
This document clarifies and updates several requirements of RFCs 4787, 5382, and 5508 based on operational and development experience. The focus of this document is Network Address Translation from IPv4 to IPv4 (NAT44).
This document updates RFCs 4787, 5382, and 5508.
Status of This Memo
This memo documents an Internet Best Current Practice.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on BCPs is available in 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/rfc7857.
Penno, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 1]
RFC 7857 Updates to NAT Behavioral Requirements April 2016
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
This document may contain material from IETF Documents or IETF Contributions published or made publicly available before November 10, 2008. The person(s) controlling the copyright in some of this material may not have granted the IETF Trust the right to allow modifications of such material outside the IETF Standards Process. Without obtaining an adequate license from the person(s) controlling the copyright in such materials, this document may not be modified outside the IETF Standards Process, and derivative works of it may not be created outside the IETF Standards Process, except to format it for publication as an RFC or to translate it into languages other than English.
Penno, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 2]
RFC 7857 Updates to NAT Behavioral Requirements April 2016
[RFC4787], [RFC5382], and [RFC5508] contributed to enhance Network Address Translation (NAT) interoperability and conformance. Operational experience gained through widespread deployment and evolution of NAT indicates that some areas of the original documents need further clarification or updates. This document provides such clarifications and updates.
The goal of this document is to clarify and update the set of requirements listed in [RFC4787], [RFC5382], and [RFC5508]. The document focuses exclusively on NAT44.
The scope of this document has been set so that it does not create new requirements beyond those specified in the documents cited above.
Requirements related to Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN) are defined in [RFC6888].
Penno, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 3]
RFC 7857 Updates to NAT Behavioral Requirements April 2016
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 [RFC2119].
The reader is assumed to be familiar with the terminology defined in [RFC2663], [RFC4787], [RFC5382], and [RFC5508].
In this document, the term "NAT" refers to both "Basic NAT" and "Network Address/Port Translator (NAPT)" (see Section 3 of [RFC4787]). As a reminder, Basic NAT and NAPT are two variations of traditional NAT in that translation in Basic NAT is limited to IP addresses alone, whereas translation in NAPT is extended to include IP addresses and transport identifiers (such as a TCP/UDP port or ICMP query ID); refer to Section 2 of [RFC3022].
[RFC5382] specifies TCP timers associated with various connection states but does not specify the TCP state machine a NAT44 should follow as a basis to apply such timers.
Update: The TCP state machine depicted in Figure 1, adapted from [RFC6146], SHOULD be implemented by a NAT for TCP session tracking purposes.
Penno, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 4]
RFC 7857 Updates to NAT Behavioral Requirements April 2016
+----------------------------+ | | V | +------+ Client | |CLOSED|-----SYN------+ | +------+ | | ^ | | |TCP_TRANS T.O. | | | V | +-------+ +-------+ | | TRANS | | INIT | | +-------+ +-------+ | | ^ | | data pkt | | | | Server/Client RST | | | TCP_EST T.O. | | V | Server SYN | +--------------+ | | | ESTABLISHED |<---------+ | +--------------+ | | | | Client FIN Server FIN | | | | V V | +---------+ +----------+ | | C FIN | | S FIN | | | RCV | | RCV | | +---------+ +----------+ | | | | Server FIN Client FIN TCP_TRANS | | T.O. V V | +----------------------+ | | C FIN + S FIN RCV |-----------------+ +----------------------+ Legend: * Messages sent or received from the server are prefixed with "Server". * Messages sent or received from the client are prefixed with "Client". * "C" means "Client-side". * "S" means "Server-side". * TCP_EST T.O. refers to the established connection idle-timeout as defined in [RFC5382]. * TCP_TRANS T.O. refers to the transitory connection idle-timeout as defined in [RFC5382].
Figure 1: Simplified Version of the TCP State Machine
Penno, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 5]
RFC 7857 Updates to NAT Behavioral Requirements April 2016
The transitory connection idle-timeout is defined as the minimum time a TCP connection in the partially open or closing phases must remain idle before the NAT considers the associated session a candidate for removal (REQ-5 of [RFC5382]). However, [RFC5382] does not clearly state whether these can be configured separately.
Clarification: This document clarifies that a NAT SHOULD provide different configurable parameters for configuring the open and closing idle timeouts.
To accommodate deployments that consider a partially open timeout of 4 minutes as being excessive from a security standpoint, a NAT MAY allow the configured timeout to be less than 4 minutes. However, a minimum default transitory connection idle-timeout of 4 minutes is RECOMMENDED.
[RFC5382] leaves the handling of TCP RST packets unspecified.
Update: This document adopts a similar default behavior as in [RFC6146]. Concretely, when the NAT receives a TCP RST matching an existing mapping, it MUST translate the packet according to the NAT mapping entry. Moreover, the NAT SHOULD wait for 4 minutes before deleting the session and removing any state associated with it if no packets are received during that 4-minute timeout.
Notes:
* Admittedly, the NAT has to verify whether received TCP RST packets belong to a connection. This verification check is required to avoid off-path attacks.
* If the NAT immediately removes the NAT mapping upon receipt of a TCP RST message, stale connections may be maintained by endpoints if the first RST message is lost between the NAT and the recipient.
REQ-1 from [RFC4787] and REQ-1 from [RFC5382] specify a specific port overlapping behavior; that is, the external IP address and port can be reused for connections originating from the same internal source IP address and port irrespective of the destination. This is known as Endpoint-Independent Mapping (EIM).
Penno, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 6]
RFC 7857 Updates to NAT Behavioral Requirements April 2016
Update: This document clarifies that this port overlapping behavior may be extended to connections originating from different internal source IP addresses and ports as long as their destinations are different.
The following mechanism MAY be implemented by a NAT:
If destination addresses and ports are different for outgoing connections started by local clients, a NAT MAY assign the same external port as the source ports for the connections. The port overlapping mechanism manages mappings between external packets and internal packets by looking at and storing their 5-tuple (protocol, source address, source port, destination address, and destination port).
This enables concurrent use of a single NAT external port for multiple transport sessions, which allows a NAT to successfully process packets in a network that has a limited number of IP addresses (e.g., deployment with a high address space multiplicative factor (refer to Appendix B of [RFC6269])).
The "IP address pooling" behavior of "Paired" (APP) was recommended in REQ-2 from [RFC4787], but the behavior when an external IPv4 runs out of ports was left undefined.
Clarification: This document clarifies that if APP is enabled, new sessions from a host that already has a mapping associated with an external IP that ran out of ports SHOULD be dropped. A configuration parameter MAY be provided to allow a NAT to start using ports from another external IP address when the one that anchored the APP mapping ran out of ports. Tweaking this configuration parameter is a trade-off between service continuity and APP strict enforcement. Note, this behavior is sometimes referred to as "soft-APP".
As a reminder, the recommendation for the particular case of a CGN is that an implementation must use the same external IP address mapping for all sessions associated with the same internal IP address, be they TCP, UDP, ICMP, something else, or a mix of different protocols [RFC6888].
Update: This behavior SHOULD apply also for TCP.
Penno, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 7]
RFC 7857 Updates to NAT Behavioral Requirements April 2016
REQ-1 from [RFC4787] and REQ-1 from [RFC5382] do not specify whether EIM are protocol dependent or protocol independent. For example, if an outbound TCP SYN creates a mapping, it is left undefined whether outbound UDP packets can reuse such mapping.
Update: EIM mappings SHOULD be protocol dependent. A configuration parameter MAY be provided to allow protocols that multiplex TCP and UDP over the same source IP address and port number to use a single mapping. The default value of this configuration parameter MUST be protocol-dependent EIM.
This update is consistent with the stateful Network Address and Protocol Translation from IPv6 Clients to IPv4 Servers (NAT64) [RFC6146] that clearly specifies three binding information bases (TCP, UDP, and ICMP).
REQ-8 from [RFC4787] and REQ-3 from [RFC5382] do not specify whether mappings with Endpoint-Independent Filtering (EIF) are protocol independent or protocol dependent. For example, if an outbound TCP SYN creates a mapping, it is left undefined whether inbound UDP packets matching that mapping should be accepted or rejected.
Update: EIF filtering SHOULD be protocol dependent. A configuration parameter MAY be provided to make it protocol independent. The default value of this configuration parameter MUST be protocol- dependent EIF.
This behavior is aligned with the update in Section 5.
Applications that can be transported over a variety of transport protocols and/or support transport fallback schemes won't experience connectivity failures if the NAT is configured with protocol-independent EIM and protocol-independent EIF.
The NAT mapping Refresh direction may have a "NAT Inbound refresh behavior" of "True" according to REQ-6 from [RFC4787], but [RFC4787] does not clarify how this behavior applies to EIF mappings. The issue in question is whether inbound packets that match an EIF mapping but do not create a new session due to a security policy should refresh the mapping timer.
Penno, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 8]
RFC 7857 Updates to NAT Behavioral Requirements April 2016
Clarification: This document clarifies that even when a NAT has an inbound refresh behavior set to "TRUE", such packets SHOULD NOT refresh the mapping. Otherwise, a simple attack of a packet every two minutes can keep the mapping indefinitely.
Update: In the case of NAT outbound refresh behavior, ICMP Errors or TCP RST outbound packets sent as a response to inbound packets SHOULD NOT refresh the mapping. Other packets that indicate the host is not interested in receiving packets MAY be configurable to also not refresh state, such as a Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN) error response [RFC5389] or IKE INVALID_SYNTAX [RFC7296].
Update: A NAT MAY disable port parity preservation for all dynamic mappings. Nevertheless, A NAT SHOULD support means to explicitly request to preserve port parity (e.g., [RFC7753]).
Note: According to [RFC6887], dynamic mappings are said to be dynamic in the sense that they are created on demand, either implicitly or explicitly:
1. Implicit dynamic mappings refer to mappings that are created as a side effect of traffic such as an outgoing TCP SYN or outgoing UDP packet. Implicit dynamic mappings usually have a finite lifetime, though this lifetime is generally not known to the client using them.
2. Explicit dynamic mappings refer to mappings that are created as a result, for example, of explicit Port Control Protocol (PCP) MAP and PEER requests. Explicit dynamic mappings have a finite lifetime, and this lifetime is communicated to the client.
Update: A NAT SHOULD follow the recommendations specified in Section 4 of [RFC6056], especially:
A NAPT that does not implement port preservation [RFC4787] [RFC5382] SHOULD obfuscate selection of the ephemeral port of a packet when it is changed during translation of that packet.
Penno, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 9]
RFC 7857 Updates to NAT Behavioral Requirements April 2016
A NAPT that does implement port preservation SHOULD obfuscate the ephemeral port of a packet only if the port must be changed as a result of the port being already in use for some other session.
A NAPT that performs parity preservation and that must change the ephemeral port during translation of a packet SHOULD obfuscate the ephemeral ports. The algorithms described in this document could be easily adapted such that the parity is preserved (i.e., force the lowest order bit of the resulting port number to 0 or 1 according to whether even or odd parity is desired).
Section 3.1 of [RFC5508] specifies that ICMP Query mappings are to be maintained by a NAT. However, the specification doesn't discuss Query mapping timeout values. Section 3.2 of [RFC5508] only discusses ICMP Query session timeouts.
Update: ICMP Query mappings MAY be deleted once the last session using the mapping is deleted.
REQ-7 from [RFC5508] specifies that a NAT enforcing Basic NAT must support traversal of hairpinned ICMP Query sessions.
Clarification: This implicitly means that address mappings from external address to internal address (similar to Endpoint- Independent Filters) must be maintained to allow inbound ICMP Query sessions. If an ICMP Query is received on an external address, a NAT can then translate to an internal IP.
REQ-7 from [RFC5508] specifies that all NATs must support the traversal of hairpinned ICMP Error messages.
Clarification: This behavior requires a NAT to maintain address mappings from external IP address to internal IP address in addition to the ICMP Query mappings described in Section 3.1 of [RFC5508].
Penno, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 10]
RFC 7857 Updates to NAT Behavioral Requirements April 2016
Because some of the clarifications and updates (e.g., Section 2) are inspired from NAT64, the security considerations discussed in Section 5 of [RFC6146] apply also for this specification.
The update in Section 3 allows for an optimized NAT resource usage. In order to avoid service disruption, the NAT must not invoke this functionality unless the packets are to be sent to distinct destination addresses.
Some of the updates (e.g., Sections 7, 9, and 11) allow for increased security compared to [RFC4787], [RFC5382], and [RFC5508]. Particularly,
o the updates in Sections 7 and 11 prevent an illegitimate node to maintain mappings activated in the NAT while these mappings should be cleared, and
o port randomization (Section 9) complicates tracking hosts located behind a NAT.
Sections 4 and 12 propose updates that increase the serviceability of a host located behind a NAT. These updates do not introduce any additional security concerns to [RFC4787], [RFC5382], and [RFC5508].
The updates in Sections 5 and 6 allow for a better NAT transparency from an application standpoint. Hosts that require a restricted filtering behavior should enable specific policies (e.g., Access Control List (ACL)) either locally or by soliciting a dedicated security device (e.g., firewall). How a host updates its filtering policies is out of scope of this document.
The update in Section 8 induces security concerns that are specific to the protocol used to interact with the NAT. For example, if PCP is used to explicitly request parity preservation for a given mapping, the security considerations discussed in [RFC6887] should be taken into account.
The update in Section 10 may have undesired effects on the performance of the NAT in environments in which fragmentation is massively experienced. Such an issue may be used as an attack vector against NATs.
Penno, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 11]
RFC 7857 Updates to NAT Behavioral Requirements April 2016
[RFC7753] Sun, Q., Boucadair, M., Sivakumar, S., Zhou, C., Tsou, T., and S. Perreault, "Port Control Protocol (PCP) Extension for Port-Set Allocation", RFC 7753, DOI 10.17487/RFC7753, February 2016, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7753>.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Dan Wing, Suresh Kumar, Mayuresh Bakshi, Rajesh Mohan, Lars Eggert, Gorry Fairhurst, Brandon Williams, and David Black for their review and discussion.
Many thanks to Ben Laurie for the SecDir review and Dan Romascanu for the Gen-ART review.
Dan Wing proposed some text for the configurable errors in Section 7.1.
Penno, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 13]
RFC 7857 Updates to NAT Behavioral Requirements April 2016
Contributors
The following individual contributed text to the document:
Sarat Kamiset Insieme Networks United States
Authors' Addresses
Reinaldo Penno Cisco Systems, Inc. 170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, California 95134 United States
Email: repenno@cisco.com
Simon Perreault Jive Communications Canada
Email: sperreault@jive.com
Mohamed Boucadair (editor) Orange Rennes 35000 France
Email: mohamed.boucadair@orange.com
Senthil Sivakumar Cisco Systems, Inc. United States