Re: UDP as a transport

[Joe Abley <jabley@isc.org>]

On Tuesday, Nov 19, 2002, at 12:44 Canada/Eastern, Edward Lewis wrote:

> After some more consultation with a Transport AD, we are being "urged" 
> to disallow the use of UDP as a transport for EPP.  Based on this, who 
> will take issue with:
>
> (Paraphrasing) EPP MUST NOT use a datagram-based transport protocol. 
> E.g., EPP MUST NOT be run using UDP or anyother protocol that does not 
> natively provide reliability and congestion control services.

It might be better to specify the specific objectionable aspects of a 
UDP transport that should not feature in a transport, rather than 
talking about a datagram-based transport.

For example, the fact that requests over UDP can be submitted with 
trivially spoofed source addresses, or that encryption or 
transport-layer authentication has to happen per transaction, rather 
than per session, might be characteristics which should not feature in 
an EPP transport protocol.

Mandating reliability seems like a poor idea (how do you do SMTP 
transport if you need transport-layer reliability?)


Joe