Re: HTTP router point-of-view concerns

I think it is perfectly reasonable for an intermediary to set the
compression size to zero if it wishes.

Market forces will (in the long-term) pick the correct strategy for this--
assuming the compression is effective at reducing latency, and that people
care about latency reductions, then eventually intermediaries might evolve
to use it.
If it is ineffective at reducing latency, or if reduced latency is not
actually desirable, then intermediaries would not use it.


The DoS vector you're talking about is not a DoS vector if the intermediary
resets all streams before the change-of-state-size comes into effect.
When the state size is 0, one should be able to use some kinds of 'indexed'
representations, so long as those representations refer only to items in
the static tables. Why do you believe that this would use more or less CPU?
(It should use less CPU and less memory...)

Headers are unbounded in HTTP. If any header is too large, there are only
two options:
1) terminate the connection
2) send a RST for that request and shove the bytes through the compressor.
This can be done in a streaming fashion so long as the recipient is smart
enough to tease out the instruction boundaries (not too hard, and certainly
no more difficult than interpreting HTTP/1.0 header fields). Assuming that
the state size is 0, these bytes can instead by discarded and do not need
to be interpreted at all.



On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 10:14 AM, James M Snell <jasnell@gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, the ability to set compression context size to 0 is very useful.
> My fears around this area are:
>
> 1. In order to achieve maximum throughput, Intermediaries may opt to
> *always* set compression context to 0, forcing the headers to always
> be passed as Literals, killing the utility of having the header
> compression mechanism there in the first place.
>
> 2. The assumption of a non-zero default compression context size when
> the connection is established opens a race condition that a malicious
> sender could exploit in a denial of service attack. Yes, the receiver
> could opt to terminate the connection once it detects bad behavior,
> but there is still a potential window of time there where the receiver
> could be forced to do significant additional work.
>
>   (This is particularly bad given that header continuations are unbounded.)
>
> 3. Setting the compression context size to 0 does not stop the sender
> from sending the Indexed Literal instructions anyway. The receiving
> endpoint would still be required to process those instructions even if
> the data is not actually being indexed, causing CPU cycles to be
> consumed. For any individual block of headers it may not be a
> significant load, but it's something that needs to be addressed.
>
>   (This can be fixed in the spec by stating that any attempt to Index
> any individual (name,value) whose size is greater than the available
> header table size results in a Compression Error. Making this change
> would mean that when Compression Context size is 0, the only operation
> that would not result in an error is Literal without Indexing. This
> was discussed on the list but as far as I can tell it's not yet
> captured in the spec).
>
> 4. The fact that header continuations can be unbounded is deeply
> troubling, especially given that the endpoint is required to buffer
> and process the complete header block (well.. that's only half true,
> the encoding does allow for incremental processing of the HEADERS
> frame payloads but the spec requires that the complete header block is
> always processed). Sure, the recipient is free to terminate the
> connection as soon as it detects bad behavior, but the sender could
> end up forcing the recipient to do a significant amount of extra
> processing with a never ending sequence of HEADERS frames. Smart
> implementations will know how to deal with this, yes, but overall it
> adds to the already growing list of "New Complex Things" that an
> HTTP/2 implementer needs to know about.
>
>   (In the implementation I've done, I provide a configuration
> parameter that allows a developer to cap the number of the
> continuations and the total size of the header block)
>
> I know that we're in "implementation" phase right now and that
> everyone is busy getting their code ready for testing in August, but
> after updating my implementation to the latest version of the draft,
> my concerns with regards to stateful header compression definitely
> remain.
>
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 9:36 AM, Martin Thomson
> <martin.thomson@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10 July 2013 21:20, Amos Jeffries <squid3@treenet.co.nz> wrote:
> >> It seems not to be negotiable from the recipients side.
> >
> > Compression context size = 0 is entirely negotiable from the recipient
> > end, with a small wrinkle, that I know some folks are working on.
> > Which is, a client can start using a default compression context size
> > prior to learning that a server has no space (substitute intermediary
> > as appropriate there).
> >
>
>