Requirements for IPv6 Firewalls

Thu Apr 17 15:59:53 UTC 2014

Hi, David,

Thanks so much for your feedback! -- Comments in-line....

On 04/17/2014 12:26 PM, David Newman wrote:
> 
> The use of RFC 2544-esque metrics for firewall performance testing
> mostly benefits ill-informed or unscrupulous firewall marketeers, who
> send 1500-byte UDP packets and then brag about excellent performance.
> 
> For firewalls handling TCP traffic, upper-layer traffic metrics such as
> HTTP object size, concurrent connection capacity, and connection setup
> rate are a lot more meaningful.
> 
> The RFC 2544/2889 approach is OK if you only ever use your firewall as a
> router or a switch. The performance of a firewall used as an L2-L7
> device should be measured with L2-L7 traffic.

Are you referring to this text from our document?

>    REQ GEN-5:
>       The firewall MUST include performance benchmarking documentation.
>       Such documentation MUST include information that reflects firewall
>       performance with respect to IPv6 packet, but also regarding how
>       IPv6 traffic may affect the performance of IPv4 traffic.  The
>       aforementioned documentation MUST be, at the very least,
>       conditionally-compliant with both [RFC3511] and [RFC5180] (that
>       is, it MUST support all "MUST" requirements in such documents, and
>       may also support the "SHOULD" requirements in such documents).
> 
>          NOTE: This is for operators to spot be able to identify cases
>          where a devices may under-perform in the presence of IPv6
>          traffic (see e.g. [FW-Benchmark]).  XXX: This note may be
>          removed before publication if deemed appropriate.

Because he RFCs we reference do require to make the measurements as you
describe...

Thanks!

Best regards,
-- 
Fernando Gont
e-mail: fernando at gont.com.ar || fgont at si6networks.com
PGP Fingerprint: 7809 84F5 322E 45C7 F1C9 3945 96EE A9EF D076 FFF1