Re: Design: Ignored Unknown Frame Types and Intermediaries

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

On May 11, 2013, at 6:27 PM, James M Snell <[e-mail]> wrote:

> In the current draft, endpoints are required to "ignore" unknown and
> unsupported frame types. What's not yet clear, however, is whether
> such frames are required to be forwarded on by intermediaries that do
> not support them.
> 
> In other words, A talks to C via reverse proxy B. A sends a stream
> that includes EXTENSION_FRAME_TYPE that is unknown to B. Is B...
> 
> A) Required to drop the frame silently without forwarding it on to C
> B) Required to always forward the frame on to C
> C) Neither, B can do whatever it wants
> 
> There is an obvious impact here on the future deployment of new
> extension frame types. If the answer is A or C, we'll have to wait on
> infrastructure support to use new frame types, which would be
> unfortunate.
> 
> - James

I think (C) is the only answer. Consider two types of proxies: an SSL accelerator and a firewall. The SSL accelerator doesn't want to break anything, so it will forward everything (B), while a firewall doesn't let things pass which it doesn't understand (A). I think this will be the behavior for these two kinds of proxy regardless of what we specify. 

Since the UA can never know in advance what the server will support, there has to be some "extension support discovery" anyways. Perhaps if we had that in the SETTINGS frame, the proxy could filter out.  For example, add a SETTINGS_SUPPORTED_EXTENSION, which will hold an extension supported by the sender. You will need multiple settings values for multiple extensions. The server would send the same list as the client, filtered down to the list of extensions that it supports. A proxy could trim the list further to remove things it's going to drop.

Yoav