[manet] Re: A partial response to <Re: Review draft-perk ins-manet-aodvv2-05>

On Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 12:39 AM Charlie Perkins
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hello Juliusz,
>
> My days as a Unix systems programmer are distant and pleasant memories.  I was, however, quite involved with implementations of AODV 20 years ago.  AODV and AODVv2 place similar demands on the operating system. I reckon that AODVv2 will be equally implementable as AODV.

I remember a few implementations of AODV (v1) when I tried to get a
running version a couple of years ago... all of them did not work
because they brought a custom kernel module for "kernel 2.6" (or
similar) with them... demanding a kernel module is not a viable
option.

I also don't think that any simulator implementation counts because
simulators (e.g. NS3 or Omnet) always take a lot of shortcuts which
make them incomparable to an implementation for a real OS.

> Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  In AODV my favorite solutions fit perfectly with the design of ICMP and the meaning of the word "reactive". The same design would work for AODVv2.  Perhaps the [manet] WG considers to disqualify any protocol development that depends on such real-time reaction.  At least part of that reaction should properly reside in the kernel.
>
> I am not aware of the huge security risk, but if you could provide more details I would be interested to learn.  Maybe we could incorporate some discussion about it in Section 14 of the draft.

The issue is that (at least) 99% good C programmers (myself included)
don't know how to write a reasonable and safe kernel module acceptable
by the kernel.org group... and if your module is NOT accepted into the
kernel it will be outdated and unusable very quickly.

Inserting code into the kernel into networking is always a big security risk...

Henning Rogge

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