Re: Design: Ignored Unknown Frame Types and Intermediaries

I believe that the simplest thing is that, when you don't understand it,
you ignore it.

If that frame was required at some semantic level, then you should have
rev'd the version number or changed the version string in some other way at
the start of communication. That is easy and robust.

This does imply that changing any state which the baseline protocol of that
version depends upon is a no-no, but doesn't preclude changing state which
the baseline protocol of that version *doesn't* know about.

Making that a MUST, i.e. something like:
And endpoint may use frames with opcodes other than those defined in this
specification, however it MUST NOT do so if ignoring such a frame would
cause an unexpected stream or session error, either directly or indirectly.
-=R


On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 9:58 PM, Yoav Nir <ynir@checkpoint.com> wrote:

>
> On May 11, 2013, at 6:27 PM, James M Snell <jasnell@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > In the current draft, endpoints are required to "ignore" unknown and
> > unsupported frame types. What's not yet clear, however, is whether
> > such frames are required to be forwarded on by intermediaries that do
> > not support them.
> >
> > In other words, A talks to C via reverse proxy B. A sends a stream
> > that includes EXTENSION_FRAME_TYPE that is unknown to B. Is B...
> >
> > A) Required to drop the frame silently without forwarding it on to C
> > B) Required to always forward the frame on to C
> > C) Neither, B can do whatever it wants
> >
> > There is an obvious impact here on the future deployment of new
> > extension frame types. If the answer is A or C, we'll have to wait on
> > infrastructure support to use new frame types, which would be
> > unfortunate.
> >
> > - James
>
> I think (C) is the only answer. Consider two types of proxies: an SSL
> accelerator and a firewall. The SSL accelerator doesn't want to break
> anything, so it will forward everything (B), while a firewall doesn't let
> things pass which it doesn't understand (A). I think this will be the
> behavior for these two kinds of proxy regardless of what we specify.
>
> Since the UA can never know in advance what the server will support, there
> has to be some "extension support discovery" anyways. Perhaps if we had
> that in the SETTINGS frame, the proxy could filter out.  For example, add a
> SETTINGS_SUPPORTED_EXTENSION, which will hold an extension supported by the
> sender. You will need multiple settings values for multiple extensions. The
> server would send the same list as the client, filtered down to the list of
> extensions that it supports. A proxy could trim the list further to remove
> things it's going to drop.
>
> Yoav
>