15. Known Open Issues and Areas of Future Work
15. Known Open Issues and Areas of Future Work
As an experimental specification, this work is, by definition, incomplete. Specific areas where additional experience and work are needed include the following:
o At present, only [RFC6836] is defined for implementing a database of EID-to-RLOC mapping information. Additional research on other mapping database systems is strongly encouraged.
o Failure and recovery of LISP site partitioning (see Section 6.4) in the presence of redundant configuration (see Section 8.5) needs further research and experimentation.
o The characteristics of map-cache management under exceptional conditions, such as denial-of-service attacks, are not fully understood. Further experience is needed to determine whether current caching methods are practical or in need of further development. In particular, the performance, scaling, and security characteristics of the map-cache will be discovered as part of this experiment. Performance metrics to be observed are packet reordering associated with the LISP Data-Probe and loss of the first packet in a flow associated with map-caching. The impact of these upon TCP will be observed. See Section 12 for additional thoughts and considerations.
o Preliminary work has been done to ensure that sites employing LISP can interconnect with the rest of the Internet. This work is documented in [RFC6832], but further experimentation and experience are needed.
o At present, no mechanism for automated key management for message authentication is defined. Addressing automated key management is necessary before this specification can be developed into a Standards Track RFC. See Section 12 for further details regarding security considerations.
o In order to maintain security and stability, Internet protocols typically isolate the control and data planes. Therefore, user activity cannot cause control-plane state to be created or destroyed. LISP does not maintain this separation. The degree to which the loss of separation impacts security and stability is a topic for experimental observation.
o LISP allows for the use of different mapping database systems. While only one [RFC6836] is currently well defined, each mapping database will likely have some impact on the security of the EID-to-RLOC mappings. How each mapping database system's security properties impact LISP overall is for further study.
o An examination of the implications of LISP on Internet traffic, applications, routers, and security is needed. This will help implementors understand the consequences for network stability, routing protocol function, routing scalability, migration and backward compatibility, and implementation scalability (as influenced by additional protocol components; additional state; and additional processing for encapsulation, decapsulation, and liveness).
o Experiments need to verify that LISP produces no significant change in the behavior of protocols run between end-systems over a LISP infrastructure versus being run directly between those same end-systems.
o Experiments need to verify that the issues raised in the Critique section of [RFC6115] are either insignificant or have been addressed by updates to LISP.
Other LISP documents may also include open issues and areas for future work.