[tcpm] TCPM and draft-ietf-tcpm-icmp-attacks

[Jari Arkko <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

This document was recently in IESG review. My opinion is that the 
document should be approved as an RFC. Thanks for writing it.

However, I would like to note the following text from the document:

  The consensus of the TCPM WG (TCP Maintenance and
  Minor Extensions Working Group) was to document this widespread
  implementation of nonstandard TCP behavior but to not change the TCP
  standard.

This would seem to imply that the TCPM WG has decided to deviate from 
the old IETF operating principle of "rough consensus and running code". 
For at least some of the techniques described in this draft, they are 
generally accepted and widely implemented on key implementations. I ask 
what the reason is for divorcing IETF standards from established best 
practices and actual running code? TCP RFCs are not sacred documents, 
they should reflect what we want our implementations to do. But maybe 
there are important use cases for the actual standard TCP behavior in 
this space, just that I don't know about them. Please educate me about 
the background for this decision.

Jari