Subject: [Dime] sctp abort on broken diameter packet

From: Cristian Constantin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2010 10:35:43 +0100

hi!

the latest draft

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-dime-rfc3588bis-25

says in "2.1. Transport"

"[...] If Diameter receives data from the lower layer that cannot
   be parsed or identified as a Diameter error made by the peer, the
   stream is compromised and cannot be recovered.  The transport
   connection MUST be closed using a RESET call (send a TCP RST bit) or
   an SCTP ABORT message (graceful closure is compromised)."

now, the big difference between sctp and tcp here is that when using 
sctp as an transport protocol, a diameter application could try to
recover from such an error (messages are _delimited_ in one sctp data
chunk belonging to that association);
tcp cannot since the message is part of the tcp stream itself and there
is no delimiter.

so, why does an sctp based diameter application _have to_ abort the
association?

thanks!
bye now!
cristian