Subject: [BXXPwg] you asked for outstanding issues?

From: j h woodyatt <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 11:20:44 -0800

comrades--

What do we want to do about implementation issues?  I have found 
several.  I think they're all resolvable within the specifications as 
they exist now, but I suspect we should be documenting our 
implementation experiences somewhere.

Did I miss the announcement that we were doing that in some other mail 
list?

I think it would be worth documenting the steps necessary to keep a BEEP 
listener from behaving poorly in the face of actively hostile 
initiators.  For example, there's a fairly amusing denial-of-service 
attack I've devised.  Consider the following pathological variant on the 
greeting message:

	Content-type: application/beep+xml

	<greeting>
	  <profile uri="http://xml.resource.org/BEEP/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
	  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
	  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [...repeat until well-done...]

There are a lot of stupid ways to code a BEEP listener that would make 
it blow up in a lovely display of failurage as soon as some bozo were to 
bang on the door with a cheep script to generate this as an endless 
stream of frames.  Consider the language in the TCP mapping document in 
section 3.1.4, which reads in part:

    o  each time a frame is received, a SEQ frame should be sent
       whenever the window size that will be sent is at least one half
       of the buffer space available to this channel;

Clearly, the implementation needs to be smart about when to make more 
buffer space available to a channel, particularly channel zero, but like 
I said-- there are some stupid ways to implement, and there are smarter 
ways.

It would be nice if we were to collect the smart ways of solving 
implementation problems in a document we could cherish and keep for 
posterity.

--
j h woodyatt <[email-masked]>
"And the difference between the CIA and
a religious cult is... what, again?" --drieux

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