Subject: [eap] Survey: handling of retransmissions

From: [email-masked] (Bernard Aboba)
Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2002 10:03:10 -0800 (PST)

A question has arisen as to how retransmissions are handled in current
implementations, as well as integrity check failures (within a method).

a. What does your Peer implementation doif it receives multiple packets
with the same Identifier before it has sent a Response?
  1. Does it check whether the packets are "the same"?
  2. Does it process the first packet, generate a Response, and clear
     the queue?
  3. Does it process all the enqueued packets?
  4. Does it drop all incoming packets other than the first one?

b. What if there are multiple incoming packets with different Identifier
values?

c. What if, after sending an EAP packet up to the method, that packet
fails a method-specific integrity check? If the method can handle it,
can it silently discard the packet and ask for the next one in the
queue?

d. What about on the Authenticator side?
  1. Does the authenticator enqueue Responses, or is only one Response
     allowed?
  2. Is the incoming queue cleared after another Request is sent?
  3. Are Responses that don't match the outstanding Request ID
     automatically discarded?