Re: [hybi] deflate-stream and masking

[Brian <[e-mail]>]

+500.  deflate-stream has always been utterly ridiculous in light of
masking.  It really should get the axe, and with extreme prejudice.  Why is
it still in the spec?  I don't recall anyone citing a reasonable reason for
keeping it, but there have been many very good arguments against it.  It's
not even very clearly specified in the document -- when I implemented it in
my Flash client, I had to read the source code of Andy Green's
implementation to figure out how it was supposed to work -- his
implementation became my specification for the extension.

Brian


On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 7:34 PM, Greg Wilkins <[e-mail]> wrote:

> I've just noticed that the w3c is currently intending to make support
> for deflate-stream mandatory!
>
>  http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12917
>
> This moves this extension from being useless, but mostly harmless, to
> being a major impost on servers and intermediaries.
> If the browser make this mandatory, then servers will obviously have
> to support it at a cost of extra CPU, extra buffers but for no
> significant savings in bandwidth.
> Intermediaries that wish to act on frame boundaries will also have to
> implement it.
>
> This illustrate that having silly options always puts you at risk of
> people taking you up on those options.
>
> This extension is demonstrably broken and needs to be either fixed or
> removed.
>
> regards
>
>
>
> On 20 June 2011 16:33, Greg Wilkins <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > As part of my continuing campaign against including deflate-stream in
> > the specification as a standard extension, I did a quick test of how
> > well it works when applied to masked frames.
> >
> > I took a days worth of traffic from an IRC channel and wrapped it up
> > as JSON messages sent as websocket frames.
> > There were 487 message that looked like:
> >
> >     {channel:"#webtide", username:"tbecker", text:"joakime: jenkins
> > had issues pulling from github a couple of times  last week"}
> >
> > As an unmasked WS stream, it was 50675 bytes, and as a masked stream
> > is was 52623 bytes.
> > I then compressed both these streams with gzip and got 13306 bytes for
> > unmasked and 51704 bytes for the masked!!!!
> >
> > So for this very typical example, masking was sufficiently random to
> > completely negate the benefits of compression.
> >
> > So the deflate-stream "extension" is:
> >
> >  + next to useless for inbound traffic
> >  + breaks all the rules of what an extension can do
> >  + is potentially vulnerable to injection as attackers can send
> > repeated patterns that may subvert masking
> >  + can be replaced by the in-frame compression extension already
> proposed.
> >  + was inserted in the draft with little or no discussion and without
> > clear consensus.
> >
> > Can I call for a straw poll of who wants to keep this extension in the
> spec?
> >
> >
> >
> > regards
> >
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