Reassignment of System Ports to the IESG
draft-kuehlewind-system-ports-04

Abstract

In the IANA Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry, a large number of System Ports is currently assigned to individuals or companies who have registered the port for the use with a certain protocol before RFC6335 was published. For some of these ports, RFCs exist that describe the respective protocol; for others, RFCs are under development that define, re-define, or assign the protocol used for the respective port, e.g. in case of so-far unused UDP ports that have been registered together with the respective TCP port. In these cases the IESG has the change control about the protocol used on the port (as described in an RFC) but does not have the change control about the port usage itself. Currently, to transfer the change control to the IESG, the original assignee has to be contacted to initialize this transfer. As it is not always possible to get in touch with the original assignee, e.g. because of out-dated contact information or other reasons, and the current practice of case-by-case changes does not scale well, this document instructs IANA to perform actions with the goal to reassigns all System Ports to the IESG that have been assigned to individuals prior to the publication of RFC6335.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

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This Internet-Draft will expire on December 8, 2019.

Copyright Notice

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1. Introduction

RFC 6335 [RFC6335] requires System Ports, also known as the Well Known Ports, in the range from 0 to 1023, to be assigned by the "IETF Review" or "IESG Approval" procedures [RFC8126]. For assignments done through RFCs published via the "IETF Document Stream" [RFC4844], the Assignee will be the IESG with the IETF Chair as the Contact.

However, ports that were assigned before the publication of RFC 6335, are often assigned to individuals, even if they are part of the System Port range and have a corresponding RFC. Besides the fact that System Ports are widely used by IETF protocols where the protocol specification is under IETF change control as defined in an RFC but the port itself may not, this situation is especially problematic if the assignment gets or needs to be changed. The Assignee can change the assignment without confirmation of the IETF. However, if the IETF process requires a change, including de-assignment, this cannot be done without the agreement of the original Assignee. Furthermore, no procedure is defined to change the assignment in cases where the original Assignee is not reachable or not available anymore.

This document instructs IANA to perform actions with the goal to re-assign all currently assigned System Ports in the range from 0 to 1023 to the IESG, which will also help to align existing entries in the "Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry" with the current procedures defined in RFC 6335.

2. IANA Considerations

IANA [will perform/has performed] action to re-assign all System Ports in the port range from 0 to 1023 that are currently assigned in the "Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry" (https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/service-names-port-numbers.xhtml) to the IESG <iesg@ietf.org> as Assignee and the IETF Chair <chair@ietf.org> as Contact. The original Assignee and respective contact information should be preserved as an Assignment note "Originally assigned to $Assignee <$Contact>" where $Assignee is the current value in the Assignee column, and $Contact is the current value in the Contact column.

To perform the assignment, IANA is requested to contact the current Assignees by email with the registered email address to request the transfer. If the provided email address is not valid anymore, IANA is requested to report this to the IESG, and the IESG is requested to perform actions, such as sending requests to the ietf@ietf.org mailing list to determine updated contact information. If these actions do not show success within 4 weeks, the IESG is requested to make a decision about the re-assignment of the port in question.

If the current Assignee does not agree to the re-assignment or does not reply within four weeks, IANA is requested to inform the IESG which then is requested to make a decision about the re-assignment of the port in question.

Before the start of this re-assignment process, IANA [will also update/has further updated] the Reference column with the following reference for the listed ports that have a corresponding published RFC that uses this port number, as well as the Assignment Notes column for historic RFCs:

As part of this maintenance effort, IANA [will further add/has further added] the following entry in addition to the existing entry for port 441 with the IESG as Assignee and the IETF chair as Contact:

3. Security Considerations

This draft instructs IANA to perform actions on the Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry. It does not change the use of the ports or protocols running on them. Therefore the security of these protocols is not impacted by these changes to the registry.

4. References

4.1. Normative References

4.2. Informative References

Authors' Addresses

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. IANA Considerations
• 3. Security Considerations
• 4. References
• 4.1. Normative References
• 4.2. Informative References
• Authors' Addresses