Re: [tcpinc] WGLC for draft-ietf-tcpinc-tcpeno

[Wesley Eddy <[e-mail]>]

On 2/22/2017 1:58 PM, David Mazieres wrote:
> Wesley Eddy <[e-mail]> writes:
>
>> 1) edge cases where you're communicating with non-ENO hosts, that do not
>> discard data on SYNs (for whatever reason), and may pollute the data
>> stream delivered to the application, breaking the goals of TCPINC to
>> work without impacting the application's TCP mapping
>>
>> 2) cases where other TCP extensions (perhaps yet to-be-defined) do
>> something in conflict with that data
> Can you make concrete suggestions for wording changes?  In particular,
> we intended to address the points you raised with the following language
> of section 4.7:
>
> 1)
>
>          If a host sends a SYN-only SYN+ENO segment bearing data and
>          subsequently receives a SYN-ACK segment without an ENO option,
>          that host MUST reset the connection even if the SYN-ACK segment
>          does not acknowledge the SYN data...


Saying "reset the connection" is interesting to me, because technically 
there is not yet any connection (there are TCBs at each side, but 
neither has entered ESTABLISHED state).  The reset that's sent should 
probably *not* acknowledge any data that may have been on the SYN-ACK, 
which seems important to state.  That way, if some application's 
transaction erroneously started due to data on the SYN, any response 
piggybacking the SYN-ACK would not be acknowledged, and the RST should 
cause the application transaction to fail.


>          To avoid unexpected connection resets, ENO implementations MUST
>          disable the use of data in SYN-only segments by default.


In my opinion, it might be better to disable the use of data in SYN-only 
segments unless the peer's ENO capability is already known through some 
means (e.g. TCB cache from prior connections).