Re: [tcpm] SYN/ACK Payloads, draft 01

[Joe Touch <[e-mail]>]

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Adam Langley wrote:
| On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 10:20 PM, Joe Touch <[e-mail]> wrote:
|> I'm confused now; your code - and your note. Let's go back to the key
issue:
|>
|>        - is the data received by the client dependent on the option?
|
| I do apologise, the confusion is my fault:
|
| There are two extensions interacting here. Firstly, there's an
| extension to include data in the SYNACK. Then there's the application
| layer signaling with the option. I was outlining the code for the
| latter. The former is an extension that could be deployed today, it's
| managed with a setsockopt on the server socket:
|
| struct tcpsa tcpsa;
| memcpy(tcpsa.tcpsa_payload, mysynackdata, length);
| setsockopt(socket, SOL_TCP, TCP_SADATA, &tcpsa, sizeof(tcpsa));
|
| listen(socket);
|
| for (;;) { accept(); ... }
|
| Obviously, this is just an implementation detail.

It's a lot more than that; it hints that the socket interface is
insufficient for using the available TCP capability for sending data
with either SYNs or SYN-ACKs. I'm wondering how/if this has been
explored before, and whether there would be a solution that maps to
TCP's model of a stream better.

The socket option above is incorrect, IMO. It implies that the user
should have control over data that ends up in the SYN-ACK directly; IMO,
TCP's stream model should allow only that data be written to the stream
early - which may require a socket option - BUT should *not* imply that
the data maps to the SYN-ACK directly.

E.g., what happens if the data is larger than the MSS? Or if the SYN-ACK
comes back with an ICMP 'too-big'? I.e., this should be called just
TCP_DATA, not TCP_SADATA.

| It's nice for
| sockets based APIs to do it like this. Since such stacks are dominant,
| the idea of a constant payload appears in the draft. I make a couple
| of exceptions to this. The ability to include a 64-bit nonce is very
| useful and easy for the stack to manage. That's done with:
|
| struct tcpsa tcpsa;
| memcpy(tcpsa.tcpsa_payload, mysynackdata, length);
| tcpsa.tcpsa_flags = TCP_SADATA_INC_NONCE;
| tcpsa.tcpsa_nonce_offset = 0;
| setsockopt(socket, SOL_TCP, TCP_SADATA, &tcpsa, sizeof(tcpsa));
|
| Also, the ability to only send this data when the SYN includes the
| SAPP option. At the moment, this is the default, although there is
| space in the flags set aside for when I get round to it.

I do not understand the semantics of a TCP option that changes the TCP
stream. TCP is a stream-oriented protocol, and each connection provides
one stream. If you want a separate channel, you ought to be using a
different protocol, e.g., SCTP.

| Example client side code and stack patches are referenced below.
|
| Again, this is just to appease the sockets API. Stacks like [1] allow
| the application to process the SYN directly and construct any SYNACK
| payload they like on a per-packet basis.

That's fine as an implementation decision, as Caitlin notes, but has no
business affecting the TCP protocol spec.

Joe
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