Re: QPACK proposal: wrap absolute index values

[Dmitri Tikhonov <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Aug 06, 2018 at 04:52:34PM +1000, Martin Thomson wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 6, 2018 at 2:46 PM Dmitri Tikhonov
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >       bool
> >       isHeaderBlocked (unsigned LargestRef)
> 
> Thanks for sharing code.  Note that I'm not just interested in whether
> I'm blocked, but for how many table updates I should block for, but I
> can use this function (repeatedly if necessary) to make that
> determination, I guess.

Well, that's just pseudo-code, you know.  I'd never CamelCase real
code!

> It took me ages to understand this code.  Are you expecting all the
> arithmetic for CurMax to be modulo MaxEntries*2 ?  Because if that is
> the case, then this makes sense.  Without that stipulation, I really
> struggled.

Yes, all the arithmetic for the absolute index is modulo MaxEntries * 2.

> 2. You can't receive a header block with a largest reference that is
> more than MaxEntries new.  This doesn't hold because we don't cap the
> amount that a header block can be blocked by.

This is true -- my assertion about the future horizon is incorrect.
Somehow I assumed that the mirror argument about the encoder worked,
but it does not.  For example, nothing prevents the encoder from
pumping the table full of speculative updates, maybe even a few times
over, before ever using it.

> Now, it's arguably a
> reasonable restriction, because it takes multiple round trips to reach
> a state where that header block can be used, but we don't currently
> prevent someone from doing something like that.
> 
> Now, it's reasonable to assume that you can't have more than
> MaxEntries worth of updates in flight, which means that in one round
> trip, this will never happen.  But we don't say that you can't
> reference dynamic table entries that are far in the future.  For this
> to work, we would have to prohibit that.  Maybe we should, because
> referencing entries that can't be sent is a footgun, just as
> referencing entries that have not yet been sent is a footgun (it can
> deadlock flow control if you do that).

Yes, for the proposed mechanism to work, we'd have to mandate that the
encoder not create new entries past some limit, which is a function of
the known decoder state (based on TSS or Header Acks) and MaxEntries.

Thanks for identifying this flaw.  The change is larger than I was
hoping it would be.  It's still worth it.

  - Dmitri.