potentially disallowing IP fragmentation on wg packets, and handling routing loops better

[Roman Mamedov]

On Sun, 6 Jun 2021 11:13:36 +0200
"Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason at zx2c4.com> wrote:

> Specifically the change would be to not allow IP fragmentation of the
> encrypted UDP packets. This way, in the case of a loop, eventually the
> packet size exceeds MTU, and it gets dropped: dumb and effective.
> Depending on how this discussion goes, a compromise would be to not
> allow fragmentation, but only for forwarded and kernel-generated
> packets, not not for locally generated userspace packets. That's more
> complex and I don't like it as much as just disallowing IP
> fragmentation all together.
> 
> Pros:
> - It solves the routing loop problem very simply.

Doesn't TTL already solve this?

> - Maybe people are running
> wireguard-over-gre-over-vxlan-over-l2tp-over-pppoe-over-god-knows-what-else,
> and this reduces the MTU to below 1280, yet they still want to put
> IPv6 through wireguard, and are willing to accept the performance
> implications.

Not only that. Sometimes transparent bridging of 1500 MTU LANs is required.

VXLAN does not allow tunnel endpoints to produce fragmented VXLAN packets.

With WG we can fragment them one level lower, *and* gain a higher efficiency
compared to hypothetical VXLAN's fragmentation, due to less header overhead on
2nd and further packets in a chain.

It would be unfortunate if this will become no longer possible.

It appears to me that people who might need to transparently join multiple
Ethernet LANs due to legacy network topologies they have to work with, weird
requirements, various legacy software etc, would outnumber those who even run
WG over WG at all, let alone getting themselves into a routing loop that way.

-- 
With respect,
Roman