Re: hotmail not dealing with ECN

Helge Hafting
2001-01-26T08:55:37Z

"H. Peter Anvin" wrote:
>
> "David S. Miller" wrote:
> >
> > It says "reserved for future use, must be zero".
> >
> > I think the descrepency (and thus what the firewalls are doing) comes
> > from the ambiguous "must be zero". I cannot fathom the RFC authors
> > meaning this to be anything other than "must be set to zero by current
> > implementations" or else what is the purpose of the "reserved for
> > future use part" right?
> >
> > Honestly, is there anyone here who can tell me honestly that when they
> > see the words "reserved" in the description of a bit field description
> > (in a hardware programmers manual of some device, for example) that
> > they think it's ok the read the value and interpret it in any way?
> >
> > To me it's always meant "we want to do cool things in the future,
> > things we haven't thought of now, so don't interpret these bits so we
> > can do that and you will still work".
> >
>
> Think of yourself as a firewall author now. You come across this, and
> go, "these bits aren't used now; this means noone should be setting
> them. I have no guarantee that anything in the future isn't going to use
> these bits for something that isn't going to override the security of my
> system."
>
> MBZ to me indicate that it is legitimate for the recipient to drop them
> as invalid if they are not. This is probably unfortunate; they really
> need specific definition about what the sender should do (set the bits to
> zero) and the recipient should do (ignore the bits.)
>
> Unfortunately, it's hard to be "liberal in what you accept" when you're
> trying to enforce a security policy.

As David pointed out, it is "reserved for future use - you must set
these bits to zero and not use it _for your own purposes_. For non-rfc
use of these bits _will_ break something the day we start using them
for something useful.

So, no reason for a firewall author to check these bits.

Helge Hafting