by zamadatix | 2025-04-20 21:23:02+00:00
It's less about whether your proposal is ready to be submitted for standards track and more about pointing out alternative proposals always seem easier when you look at the primitive in isolation compared to a fully fleshed out solution in place today. But yes, I imagine the needed mechanism would be similar (if not identical to) the existing solutions deployed in PMTUD and PLPMTUD.

Yes, such a person in your path is problematic for both solutions. The point is not that such a person is wholly unproblematic with the ICMP solution, it's that truncation provides no additional authentication in such scenarios as was claimed. If you can already assume a fully trusted and validated path without the possibility of anyone interfering then you don't really need to worry about spoofed ICMP either, not that the involvement of the MTU discovery algorithm had much to do it with that result. Pragmatically the answer here is one loses trust of any payload which is not whole and matching contained signatures, but that still remains true when one uses truncation instead.

Agreed on minimally safe MTU, another case where truncation would not actually be providing a change from the current implementation.

In regards to the discussion around the downsides of the current ICMP approach the claim is it's no less safe than truncation, not that it was more safe. Truncation was said to have brought authentication of packets claiming MTU change, in reality it provides the same level of veracity as ICMP in, yet again, a very similar manner. In regards to size of data to accept one needs to accept single ICMP destination unreachable type packets of up to 576 bytes to handle the MTU use case (other ICMP packet types and use cases may allow for more but you don't have to support that for handling MTU notifications). It's not an accident 576 bytes is also the minimum maximum packet size define for IPv4. This means the largest unauthenticated packet you need to parse is the same size as it would be in the truncation case: 1 of whatever the protocol defines as the minimum maximum packet size.

Protocols without a cleartext source address (or much besides a destination address) in the header are definitely an interesting topic, and there are certainly use cases for this, but these really end up at the same kind of conversation except you get to skip the PMTUD portions and go straight to doing PLPMTUD inside the encrypted portion. With PLPMTUD inside the encrypted portion clients never have to listen to anything which came in a packet with an invalid signature. If one introduces truncation in this scenario you lose that as clients now need to also implicitly trust that a small packet with a broken signature was genuinely an MTU hint rather than a maliciously spoofed copy or whatnot.

The only thing I'll say against such high secure protocols is they would not necessarily be something for everyone: they'd mandate a lot of things which may not be pragmatic for many use cases. E.g. when one wants to trade source anonymity for RPF protections. Or when one doesn't get value from encryption but gets value from load balancing/directing on header info in a high performance scenario. Or easy handling of multiple generations of protocols with opposing design goals in transport equipment. This is all to say I think such protocols would be valuable but I'd stop short of saying it's what IP needs to/should have done.