TOC 
SIPD.R. Worley
Internet-DraftBluesocket
Expires: July 13, 2008January 10, 2008

Addressing and Routing of Requests in SIP

draft-worley-address-route-00

Status of this Memo

By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is aware have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she becomes aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts.

Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as “work in progress.”

The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt.

The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html.

This Internet-Draft will expire on July 13, 2008.

Copyright Notice

Copyright © The IETF Trust (2008).

Abstract

The current "request URI rewriting" technique of routing SIP requests makes support of several desired uses of SIP problematic. This document is to discuss these problems and suggest a direction in which to proceed toward solutions.



Table of Contents

1.  Introduction
2.  Problem Use Cases
    2.1.  "Where did this come from?"
    2.2.  Subaddressing
    2.3.  Emergency Services
3.  Security Considerations
4.  Revision History
    4.1.  draft-worley-address-route-00
5.  Informative References
§  Author's Address
§  Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements




 TOC 

1. Introduction

The problems surrounding "request URI rewriting" are common and are likely to become more intense. In the PSTN, there are a small number of fairly well-controlled ways that calls can be forwarded, routed, and redirected. SIP is more flexible, allowing nearly arbitrary address manipulation by all SIP agents. Quite a number of different rewriting operations are present in the small-to-medium organization PBX system that the author's company produces, and we can expect that as people become more familiar with the possibilities, rewriting will become as routinely complex as e-mail forwarding is now. For example, a recent message to the IETF SIP mailing list contained the following Received headers:

Received: from localhost (dragon.ariadne.com [127.0.0.1])
        by dragon.ariadne.com (8.12.8/8.12.8) with ESMTP id m0AFA507018184
        for <worley@localhost>; Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:10:05 -0500
Received: from mail.g.comcast.net [216.148.227.80]
        by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-6.2.0)
        for worley@localhost (single-drop); Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:10:05 -0500 (EST)
Received: from imta21.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net ([76.96.30.31])
          by sccrmxc16.comcast.net (sccrmxc16) with ESMTP
          id <20080110150359s1600jigc6e>; Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:03:59 +0000
Received: from megatron.ietf.org ([156.154.16.145])
        by IMTA21.emeryville.ca.mail.comcast.net with comcast
        id bT3y1Y00d37nXEc0M00000; Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:03:59 +0000
Received: from [127.0.0.1] (helo=stiedprmman1.va.neustar.com)
        by megatron.ietf.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43)
        id 1JCywW-0008B8-3E; Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:03:40 -0500
Received: from sip by megatron.ietf.org with local (Exim 4.43)
        id 1JCywV-0008B1-40
        for sip-confirm+ok@megatron.ietf.org; Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:03:39 -0500
Received: from [10.91.34.44] (helo=ietf-mx.ietf.org)
        by megatron.ietf.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1JCywU-0008As-QR
        for sip@ietf.org; Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:03:38 -0500
Received: from rtp-iport-2.cisco.com ([64.102.122.149])
        by ietf-mx.ietf.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1JCywT-0000Gu-Vl
        for sip@ietf.org; Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:03:38 -0500
Received: from rtp-dkim-1.cisco.com ([64.102.121.158])
        by rtp-iport-2.cisco.com with ESMTP; 10 Jan 2008 10:03:38 -0500
Received: from rtp-core-2.cisco.com (rtp-core-2.cisco.com [64.102.124.13])
        by rtp-dkim-1.cisco.com (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id m0AF3bXs026778;
        Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:03:37 -0500
Received: from xbh-rtp-211.amer.cisco.com (xbh-rtp-211.cisco.com
        [64.102.31.102])
        by rtp-core-2.cisco.com (8.12.10/8.12.6) with ESMTP id m0AF3apm000195;
        Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:03:37 GMT
Received: from xfe-rtp-202.amer.cisco.com ([64.102.31.21]) by
        xbh-rtp-211.amer.cisco.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.1830);
        Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:03:31 -0500
Received: from [161.44.174.128] ([161.44.174.128]) by
        xfe-rtp-202.amer.cisco.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.1830);
        Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:03:31 -0500

That is 13 routing decisions that were considered important enough by the SMTP agent to log it.



 TOC 

2. Problem Use Cases

Jonathan's "UA Loose Routing I-D[1] (Rosenberg, J., “Applying Loose Routing to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) User Agents (A),” June 2007.) provides a number of use cases or problems to be solved. Many of these cases are fundamentally the same, so we here divide them into groups.



 TOC 

2.1. "Where did this come from?"

In a number of situations, the UA that receives a request requires more information about how the request was addressed to itself than is provided by the request-URI. (Or more than can be easily represented in the request-URI by present techniques.)



 TOC 

2.2. Subaddressing

A number of situations are forms of subaddressing, where an "authority" issues an AOR to a user or user agent, which in turn wants to create a series of "subaddresses". The subaddresses are required to all route to the user agent, but the user agent desires to be able to determine which subaddress was used in the original request.

(We assume that the authority prescribes the method by which the subaddresses are constructed from the AOR, but that the authority has no knowledge of which specific subaddresses have been constructed prior to their appearance in a request to be routed.)



 TOC 

2.3. Emergency Services

To quote from [1] (Rosenberg, J., “Applying Loose Routing to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) User Agents (A),” June 2007.):

A key requirement of systems supporting emergency calling is that the SIP INVITE request for an emergency call be 'marked' in some way that makes it clear that it is an emergency call, so that it can receive priority treatment [7]. However, such a marking needs to be done in a way that it cannot be abused by attackers seeking to get special treatment for non- emergency calls. The solution for this is that the marking needs to be the target address of the request itself, which would unambiguously identify an emergency services call taker as the target.



 TOC 

3. Security Considerations

Security issues have not been considered.



 TOC 

4. Revision History



 TOC 

4.1. draft-worley-address-route-00

First version.



 TOC 

5. Informative References

[1] Rosenberg, J., “Applying Loose Routing to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) User Agents (A),” I-D draft-rosenberg-sip-ua-loose-route-01, June 2007.


 TOC 

Author's Address

  Dale R. Worley
  Pingtel Corp.
  10 North Ave.
  Burlington, MA 01803
  US
Phone:  +1 781 229 0533 x173
Email:  dworley@pingtel.com
URI:  http://www.pingtel.com


 TOC 

Intellectual Property Statement

Disclaimer of Validity

Copyright Statement

Acknowledgment