Subject: New Non-WG Mailing List: Spud -- Session Protocol Underneath Datagrams

From: IETF Secretariat <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2015 12:47:32 -0800

A new IETF non-working group email list has been created.

List address: [email-masked]
Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/spud/
To subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/spud

Purpose:

The deployment of new transport protocols as well as the extension of 
existing IETF-defined transport protocols faces the continuing challenge 
of how to make these protocols robust against packet and flow 
modification in the Internet at the hands of middleboxes. The increasing 
deployment of these packet modifications have made expectations about 
packet handling behaviors implicit. For example, a TCP packet with the 
SYN and ACK flags set not only synchronizes sequence numbers and set up 
state on both endpoints for a TCP connection (its explicit meaning), it 
also confirms network address translation (NAT) mappings along the path 
as well as signifying to any firewalls along the path that the endpoint 
has accepted the connection (implicit meanings). One strategy to resolve 
this tussle, identified and discussed during the recent IAB workshop on 
Stack Evolution in a Middlebox Internet (SEMI), would be to provide a 
mechanism for applications at the end as well as boxes along the path to 
explicitly declare their assumptions and intentions. This list is for 
discussion of the definition of such a mechanism, as part of a pre-WG 
activity to determine what can be done.

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