Skip to main content

A Negative Acknowledgement Mechanism for Signaling Compression
draft-ietf-rohc-sigcomp-nack-02

The information below is for an old version of the document that is already published as an RFC.
Document Type
This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 4077.
Author Adam Roach
Last updated 2015-10-14 (Latest revision 2004-10-21)
RFC stream Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
Intended RFC status Proposed Standard
Formats
Additional resources Mailing list discussion
Stream WG state (None)
Document shepherd (None)
IESG IESG state Became RFC 4077 (Proposed Standard)
Action Holders
(None)
Consensus boilerplate Unknown
Telechat date (None)
Responsible AD Allison J. Mankin
Send notices to cabo@tzi.org, lars-erik.jonsson@ericsson.com
draft-ietf-rohc-sigcomp-nack-02
Network Working Group                                        A. B. Roach
Internet-Draft                                          Estacado Systems
Expires: April 20, 2005                                 October 20, 2004

     A Negative Acknowledgement Mechanism for Signaling Compression
                    draft-ietf-rohc-sigcomp-nack-02

Status of this Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
   all provisions of Section 4 of RFC3667.  By submitting this Internet-
   Draft, each author represents that any applicable patent or other IPR
   claims of which he or she is aware have been or will be disclosed,
   and any of which he or she become aware will be disclosed, in
   accordance with RFC 3668.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups.  Note that
   other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
   Drafts.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://
   www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt.

   The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
   http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html.

   This Internet-Draft will expire on April 20, 2005.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004).

Abstract

   This document describes a mechanism that allows Signaling Compression
   (SigComp) implementations to report precise error information upon
   receipt of a message which cannot be decompressed.  This negative
   feedback can be used by the recipient to make fine-grained
   adjustments to the compressed message before retransmitting it,
   allowing for rapid and efficient recovery from error situations.

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

Table of Contents

   1.    Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   1.1   The Problem  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   1.1.1 Compartment Disposal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   1.1.2 Client Restart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   1.1.3 Server Failover  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   1.2   The Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   2.    Node Behavior  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
   2.1   Normal SigComp Message Transmission  . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
   2.2   Receiving a "Bad" SigComp Message  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
   2.3   Receiving a SigComp NACK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
   2.3.1 Unreliable Transport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
   2.3.2 Reliable Transport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
   2.4   Detecting Support for NACK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
   3.    Message Format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
   3.1   Message Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
   3.2   Reason Codes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
   4.    Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
   4.1   Reflector Attacks  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
   4.2   NACK Spoofing  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
   5.    IANA Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
         Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
   A.    IPR Disclosure Acknowledgement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
         Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
         Non-Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
   B.    IPR Notice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
   C.    Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
   D.    Changes  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
   D.1   Changes since draft-ietf-rohc-sigcomp-nack-01  . . . . . . . 23
   D.2   Changes since draft-ietf-rohc-sigcomp-nack-00  . . . . . . . 23
   D.3   Changes since draft-roach-sigcomp-nack-01  . . . . . . . . . 23
   D.4   Changes since draft-roach-sigcomp-nack-00  . . . . . . . . . 24
         Full Copyright Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

1. Introduction

   Signaling Compression (see reference [1]), often called "SigComp",
   defines a protocol for transportation of compressed messages between
   two network elements.  One of the key features of SigComp is the
   ability of the sending node to request that the receiving node store
   state objects for later retrieval.

1.1 The Problem

   While the "SigComp - Extended Operations" document (reference [2])
   defines a mechanism that allows for confirmation of state creation,
   operational experience with the SigComp protocol has demonstrated
   that there are still several circumstances in which a sender's view
   of the shared state differs from the receiver's view.  A non-
   exhaustive list of the circumstances in which such failures may occur
   are detailed below.

1.1.1 Compartment Disposal

   In SigComp, stored states are associated with compartments.
   Conceptually, the compartments represent one instance of a remote
   application.  These compartments are used to limit the amount of
   state that each remote application is allowed to store.  Compartments
   are created upon receipt of a valid SigComp message from a remote
   application.  In the current protocol, applications are expected to
   signal when they are finished with a compartment so that it can be
   deleted (by using the S-bit in requested feedback data).

   Unfortunately, expecting the applications to be well-behaved is not
   sufficient to prevent state from piling up.  Unexpected client
   failures, reboots, and loss of connectivity can cause compartments to
   become "stuck" and never removed.  To prevent this situation, it
   becomes necessary to implement a scheme by which compartments that
   appear disused may eventually be discarded.

   While the preceding facts make such a practice necessary, discarding
   compartments without explicit signaling can have the unfortunate side
   effect that active compartments are sometimes discarded.  This leads
   to a different view of state between the server and the client.

1.1.2 Client Restart

   The prime motivation behind SigComp was compression of messages to be
   sent over a radio interface.  Consequently, most deployments of
   SigComp will involve a mobile unit as one of the the endpoints.
   Mobile terminals are generally not guaranteed to be available for
   extended durations of time.  Node restarts (due to e.g.  a battery

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

   running out) will induce situations in which the network-based server
   believes that the client contains several states that are no longer
   actually available.

1.1.3 Server Failover

   Many applications for which SigComp will be used (e.g., SIP [3]) use
   DNS SRV records for server lookup.  One of the important features of
   DNS SRV records is the ability to specify multiple servers from which
   clients will select at random, with probabilities determined by the
   q-value weighting.  The reason for defining this behavior for SRV
   records is to allow load distribution through a set of equivalent
   servers, and to permit clients to continue to function even if the
   server with which they are communicating fails.  When using protocols
   that use SRV for such distribution, the traffic to a failed server is
   typically sent by the client to an equivalent server that can serve
   the same purpose.  From an application perspective, this new server
   often appears to be the same endpoint as the failed server, and will
   consequently resolve to the same compartment.

   Although SigComp state can be replicated amongst such a cluster of
   servers, maintaining integrity of such states requires a two-phase
   commit process, which adds a great deal of complexity to the server,
   and can degrade performance significantly.

1.2 The Solution

   Although SigComp allows returned SigComp parameters to signal that
   all states have been lost (by setting "state_memory_size" to 0 for
   one message in the reverse direction), such an approach provides an
   incomplete solution to the problem.  In addition to wiping out an
   entire compartment when only one state is corrupt or missing, this
   approach suffers from the unfortunate behavior that it requires a
   message in the reverse direction that the remote application will
   authorize.  Unless a lower-layer security mechanism is employed (e.g.
   TLS), this would typically mean that a compressed application-level
   message in the reverse direction must be sent before recovery can
   occur.  In many cases, such as SIP-based mobile terminals, such
   messages may be seldom; in others (pure client/server deployments),
   they won't ever happen.

   The proposed solution to this problem is a simple Negative
   Acknowledgement (NACK) mechanism which allows the recipient to
   communicate to the sender that a failure has occurred.  This NACK
   contains a reason code that communicates the nature of the failure.
   For certain types of failures, the NACK will also contain additional
   details that might be useful in recovering from the failure.

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

2. Node Behavior

   The following sections detail the behavior of nodes sending and
   receiving SigComp NACKs.  The actual format and values are described
   in Section 3.

2.1 Normal SigComp Message Transmission

   Although normal in all other respects, SigComp implementations that
   use the NACK mechanism need to calculate and store a SHA-1 hash for
   each SigComp message that they send.  This must be stored in such a
   way that, given the SHA-1 hash, the implementation is able to locate
   the compartment with which the sent message was associated.

      In other words, if someone hands the SHA-1 hash back to the
      compressor, it needs to be able to find the compartment with which
      it was working when it sent the message with that hash.  This only
      requires that the compressor knows with which compartment it is
      working when it sends a message (which is always the case), and
      that the SHA-1 hash, when stored, points to that compartment in
      some way.

2.2 Receiving a "Bad" SigComp Message

   When a received SigComp message causes a decompression failure, the
   recipient forms and sends a SigComp NACK message.  This NACK message
   contains a SHA-1 hash of the received SigComp message that could not
   be decompressed.  It also contains the exact reason decompression
   failed, as well as any additional details that might assist the NACK
   recipient to correct any problems.  See Section 3 for more
   information about formatting the NACK message and its fields.

   For a connection-oriented transport, such as TCP, the NACK message is
   sent back to the originator of the failed message over that same
   connection.

   For a stream-based transport, such as TCP, the standard SigComp
   delimiter of 0xFFFF is used to terminate the NACK message.

   For a connectionless transport, such as UDP, the NACK message is sent
   back to the originator of the failed message at the port and IP
   address from which the message was sent.  Note that this may or may
   not be the same port on which the application would typically receive
   messages.  To accommodate implementations that use connect() or
   similar constructs, the NACK will be sent from the IP address and
   port to which the uninterpretable message was sent.  From a practical
   perspective, this is probably easiest to determine by binding

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

   listening sockets to a specific interface; however, other mechanisms
   may also be employed.

      The behavior specified above is strictly necessary for any
      generally useful form of a NACK mechanism.  In the most general
      case, when an implementation receives a message that it cannot
      decompress, it has exactly three useful pieces of information: the
      contents of the message, an indication of why the message cannot
      be decoded, and the IP address and port from which the message
      originated.  Note that none of these contains any indication of
      where the remote application is listening for messages, if it
      differs from the sending port.

2.3 Receiving a SigComp NACK

   The first action taken upon receipt of a NACK is an attempt to find
   the message to which the NACK corresponds.  This search is performed
   using the 20-byte SHA-1 hash contained in the NACK.  Once the
   matching message is located, further operations are performed based
   on the compartment that was associated with the sent message.

   Further behavior of a node upon receiving a SigComp NACK depends on
   whether a reliable or unreliable transport is being used.

2.3.1 Unreliable Transport

   When SigComp is used over an unreliable transport, the application
   has no reasonable expectation that the transport layer will deliver
   any particular message.  It then becomes the application layer's
   responsibility to ensure that data is retransmitted as necessary.  In
   these circumstances, the NACK mechanism relies on such behavior to
   ensure delivery of the message, and never performs retransmissions on
   the application's behalf.

   When a NACK is received for a message sent over an unreliable
   transport, the NACK recipient uses the contained information to make
   appropriate adjustments to the compressor associated with the proper
   compartment.  The exact nature of these adjustments are specific to
   the compression scheme being used, and will vary from implementation
   to implementation.  The only requirement on these adjustments is that
   they must have the effect of compensating for the error that has been
   indicated (e.g.  by removing the state that the remote node indicates
   it cannot retrieve).

   In particular, when an unreliable transport is used, the original
   message must not be retransmitted by the SigComp layer upon receipt
   of a NACK.  Instead, the next application initiated transmission of a

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

   message will take advantage of the adjustments made as a result of
   processing the NACK.

2.3.2 Reliable Transport

   When a reliable transport is employed, the application makes a basic
   assumption that any message passed down the stack will be
   retransmitted as necessary to ensure that the remote node receives it
   unless a failure is indicated by the transport layer.  Because
   SigComp acts as a shim between the transport-layer and the
   application, it becomes the responsibility of the SigComp
   implementation to ensure that any failure to transmit a message is
   communicated to the application.

   When a NACK is received for a message sent over a reliable transport,
   the SigComp layer must indicate to the application that an error has
   occurred.  In general, the application should react in the same way
   as it does for any other transport layer error, such as a TCP
   connection reset.  For most applications, this reaction will
   initially be an attempt to reset and re-establish the connection, and
   re- initiate the failed transaction.  The SigComp layer should also
   use the information contained in the NACK to make appropriate
   adjustments to the compressor associated with the proper compartment
   (similar to the adjustments made for unreliable transport).  Thus, if
   the compartment is not reset by resetting the TCP connection, the
   next message will take advantage of the adjustments.

2.4 Detecting Support for NACK

   Detection of support for the NACK mechanism may be beneficial in some
   certain circumstances.  For example, with the current definition of
   SigComp, acknowledgment of state receipt is required before a sender
   can reference such state.  In cases in which multiple messages are
   sent before a response is received, the need to wait for such
   responses can cause significant decreases in message compression
   efficiency.  If it is known that the receiver supports the NACK
   mechanism, the sender can instead optimistically assume that the
   state created by a sent message has been created, and is allowed to
   be referenced; if such an assumption turns out to be false (due to,
   for example, packet loss or packet reordering), the sender can
   recover upon receipt of a NACK.

   In order to facilitate such detection, any implementation that will
   send NACK messages upon decompression failure will indicate a SigComp
   version number of 0x02 in its UDVM.  The bytecodes sent to such an
   endpoint can check the version number, and send appropriate
   indication back to their compressor as requested feedback.  Except
   for the NACK mechanism described in this document, implementations

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

   advertising a version of 0x02 behave exactly like those advertising a
   version number of 0x01.

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

3. Message Format

   SigComp NACK packets are syntactically valid SigComp messages which
   have been specifically designed to be safely ignored by
   implementations that do not support the NACK mechanism.

   In particular, NACK messages are formatted as the second variant of a
   SigComp message (typically used for code upload) with a "code_len"
   field of zero.  The NACK information (message identifier, reason for
   failure, and error details) is encoded in the "remaining SigComp
   message" area, typically used for input data.  Further, the
   "destination" field is used as a version identifier to indicate which
   version of NACK is being employed.

3.1 Message Fields

   The format of the NACCK message and the use of the fields within it
   are shown in Figure 1.

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

   ---------------------------------------------------------------------

             0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7
           +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
           | 1   1   1   1   1 | T |   0   |
           +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
           |                               |
           :    returned feedback item     :
           |                               |
           +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
           |         code_len = 0          |
           +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
           | code_len = 0  |  version = 1  |
           +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
           |          Reason Code          |
           +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
           |  OPCODE of failed instruction |
           +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
           |   PC of failed instruction    |
           |                               |
           +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
           |                               |
           : SHA-1 Hash of failed message  :
           |                               |
           +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
           |                               |
           :         Error Details         :
           |                               |
           +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+

                 Figure 1: SigComp NACK Message Format

   ---------------------------------------------------------------------

   o  "Reason Code" is a one-byte value that indicates the nature of the
      decompression failure.  The specific codes are given in Section
      3.2

   o  "OPCODE of failed instruction" is a single byte field that
      includes the opcode to which the PC was pointing when the failure
      occurred.  If failure occurred before the UDVM began executing any
      code, this field is set to 0.

   o  "PC of failed instruction" is a two-byte field containing the
      value of the program counter when failure occurred (i.e.  the
      memory address of the failed UDVM instruction).  The field is
      encoded with the most significant byte of the PC first (i.e.  in

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 10]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

      "network" or "big endian" order).  If failure occurred before the
      UDVM began executing any code, this field is set to 0.

   o  "SHA-1 Hash of failed message" contains the full 20-byte SHA-1
      hash of the SigComp message that could not be decompressed.  This
      information allows the NACK recipient to locate the message that
      failed to decompress so that adjustments to the correct
      compartment can be performed.  When performing this hash, the
      entire SigComp message is used, from the header byte (binary
      11111xxx) to the end of the input.  Any lower-level protocol
      headers (such as UDP or IP) and message delimiters (the 0xFFFF
      that marks message boundaries in stream protocols) are not
      included in the hash.  When used over a stream based protocol, any
      0xFFxx escape sequences are un-escaped before performing the hash
      operation.

   o  "Error Details" provides any additional information that might be
      useful in correcting the problem that caused decompression
      failure.  Its meaning is specific to the "Reason Code".  See
      Section 3.2 for specific information on what appears in this
      field.

   o  "Code_len" is the "code_len" field from a standard SigComp
      message.  It is always set to "0" for NACK messages.

   o  "Version" gives the version of the NACK mechanism being employed.
      This document defines version 1.

3.2 Reason Codes

   Note that many of the status codes are more useful in debugging
   interoperability problems than with on-the-fly correction of errors.
   The "STATE_NOT_FOUND" error is a notable exception: it will generally
   cause the NACK recipient to encode future messages so as to not use
   the indicated state.

   Upon receiving the other status messages, an implementation would
   typically be expected to either use a different set of bytecodes or,
   if that is not an option, to send that specific message uncompressed.

   ---------------------------------------------------------------------

       Error                      Code Details
       -------------------------- ---- ---------------------------
       STATE_NOT_FOUND              1  State ID (6 - 20 bytes)
       CYCLES_EXHAUSTED             2  Cycles Per Bit (1 byte)

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 11]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

       USER_REQUESTED               3
       SEGFAULT                     4
       TOO_MANY_STATE_REQUESTS      5
       INVALID_STATE_ID_LENGTH      6
       INVALID_STATE_PRIORITY       7
       OUTPUT_OVERFLOW              8
       STACK_UNDERFLOW              9
       BAD_INPUT_BITORDER          10
       DIV_BY_ZERO                 11
       SWITCH_VALUE_TOO_HIGH       12
       TOO_MANY_BITS_REQUESTED     13
       INVALID_OPERAND             14
       HUFFMAN_NO_MATCH            15
       MESSAGE_TOO_SHORT           16
       INVALID_CODE_LOCATION       17
       BYTECODES_TOO_LARGE         18  Memory size (2 bytes)
       INVALID_OPCODE              19
       INVALID_STATE_PROBE         20
       ID_NOT_UNIQUE               21  State ID (6 - 20 bytes)
       MULTILOAD_OVERWRITTEN       22
       STATE_TOO_SHORT             23  State ID (6 - 20 bytes)
       INTERNAL_ERROR              24
       FRAMING_ERROR               25

   Only the five errors "STATE_NOT_FOUND", "CYCLES_EXHAUSTED",
   "BYTECODES_TOO_LARGE", "ID_NOT_UNIQUE", and "STATE_TOO_SHORT" contain
   details; for all other error codes, the "Error Details" field has
   zero length.

                  Figure 2: SigComp NACK Reason Codes

   ---------------------------------------------------------------------

   1.   STATE_NOT_FOUND
        A state that was referenced cannot be found.  The state may have
        been referenced by the UDVM executing a STATE-ACCESS
        instruction; it also may have been referenced by the "partial
        state identifier" field in a SigComp message.  The "details"
        field contains the state identifier for the state that could not
        be found.  This is also the proper error to return in the case
        that a unique state item was matched but fewer bytes of state ID
        were sent than required by the minimum_access_length.

   2.   CYCLES_EXHAUSTED
        Decompression of the message has taken more cycles than were
        allocated to it.  The "details" field contains a one-byte value
        that communicates the number of cycles per bit.  The cycles per
        bit is represented as an unsigned 8-bit integer (i.e.  not

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 12]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

        encoded).

   3.   USER_REQUESTED
        The DECOMPRESSION-FAILURE opcode has been executed.

   4.   SEGFAULT
        An attempt to read from or write to memory that is outside of
        the UDVM's memory space has been attempted.

   5.   TOO_MANY_STATE_REQUESTS
        More than four requests to store or delete state objects have
        been requested.

   6.   INVALID_STATE_ID_LENGTH
        A state id length less than 6 or greater than 20 has been
        specified.

   7.   INVALID_STATE_PRIORITY
        A state priority of 65535 has been specified when attempting to
        store a state.

   8.   OUTPUT_OVERFLOW
        The decompressed message is too large to be decoded by the
        receiving node.

   9.   STACK_UNDERFLOW
        An attempt to pop a value off the UDVM stack was made with a
        stack_fill value of 0.

   10.  BAD_INPUT_BITORDER
        An INPUT-BITS or INPUT-HUFFMAN instruction was encountered with
        the "input_bit_order" register set to an invalid value (i.e.
        one of the upper 13 bits is set).

   11.  DIV_BY_ZERO
        A DIVIDE or REMAINDER opcode was encountered with a divisor of
        0.

   12.  SWITCH_VALUE_TOO_HIGH
        The input to a SWITCH opcode exceeds the number of branches
        defined.

   13.  TOO_MANY_BITS_REQUESTED
        An INPUT-BITS or INPUT-HUFFMAN instruction was encountered that
        attempted to input more than 16 bits.

   14.  INVALID_OPERAND
        An operand for an instruction could not be resolved to an

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 13]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

        integer value (e.g.  a literal or reference operand beginning
        with 11111111).

   15.  HUFFMAN_NO_MATCH
        The input string does not match any of the bitcodes in the
        INPUT-HUFFMAN opcode.

   16.  MESSAGE_TOO_SHORT
        When attempting to decode a SigComp message, the recipient
        determined that there were not enough bytes in the message for
        it to be valid.

   17.  INVALID_CODE_LOCATION
        The "code location" field in the SigComp message was set to the
        invalid value of 0.

   18.  BYTECODES_TOO_LARGE
        The bytecodes that a SigComp message attempted to upload exceed
        the amount of memory available in the receiving UDVM.  The
        details field is a two-byte expression of the
        DECOMPRESSION_MEMORY_SIZE of the receiving UDVM.  This value is
        communicated most-significant-byte first.

   19.  INVALID_OPCODE
        The UDVM attempted to identify an undefined byte value as an
        instruction.

   20.  INVALID_STATE_PROBE
        When attempting to retrieve state, the state_length operand is
        set to 0 but the state_begin operand is non-zero.

   21.  ID_NOT_UNIQUE
        A partial state identifier that was used to access state matched
        more than one state item.  Note that this error might be
        returned as the result of executing a STATE-ACCESS instruction
        or as a result of attempting to locate a unique piece of state
        as identified by the "partial state identifier" in a SigComp
        message.  The "details" field contains the partial state
        identifier that was requested.

   22.  MULTILOAD_OVERWRITTEN
        A MULTILOAD instruction attempted to overwrite itself.

   23.  STATE_TOO_SHORT
        A STATE-ACCESS instruction has attempted to copy more bytes from
        a state item than the state item actually contains.  The
        "details" field contains the partial state identifier that was
        requested.  Implementors are cautioned to return only the

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 14]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

        partial state identifier that was requested; if the NACK
        contains any state identifer in addition to what was requested,
        attackers may be able to use that additional information to
        access the state.

   24.  INTERNAL_ERROR
        The UDVM encountered an unexpected condition that prevented it
        from decompressing the message.

   25.  FRAMING_ERROR
        The UDVM encountered a framing error (unquoted 0xFF 80 ..  0xFF
        FE in an input stream.) This error is applicable only to
        messages received on a stream transport.  In the case of a
        framing error, a SHA-1 hash for a unique message cannot be
        determined; consequently, when a FRAMING_ERROR NACK is sent, the
        "SHA-1 Hash of failed message" field should be set to all zeros.

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 15]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

4. Security Considerations

4.1 Reflector Attacks

   Because SigComp NACK messages are by necessity sent in response to
   other messages, it is possible to trigger them by intentionally
   sending malformed messages to a SigComp implementation with a spoofed
   IP address.  However, because such actions can only generate one
   message for each message sent, they don't serve as amplifier attacks.
   Further, due to the reasonably small size of NACK packets, there
   cannot be a significant increase in the size of the packet generated.

   It is worth noting that nearly all deployed protocols exhibit this
   same behavior.

4.2 NACK Spoofing

   Although it is possible to forge NACK messages as if they were
   generated by a different node, the damage that can be caused is
   minimal.  Reporting a loss of state will typically result in nothing
   more than the re-transmission of that state in a subsequent message.
   Other failure codes would result in the next message being sent using
   an alternate compression mechanism, or possibly uncompressed.

   Although all of the above consequences result in slightly larger
   messages, none of them have particularly catastrophic implications
   for security.

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 16]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

5. IANA Considerations

   This document defines a new value for the IANA registered attribute
   SigComp_version.

   Value (in hex): 02

   Description: SigComp version 2 (NACK support)

   Reference: [RFCXXXX]

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 17]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

Normative References

   [1]  Price, R., Bormann, C., Christoffersson, J., Hannu, H., Liu, Z.
        and J. Rosenberg, "Signaling Compression (SigComp)", RFC 3320,
        January 2003.

   [2]  Hannu, H., Christoffersson, J., Forsgren, S., Leung, K., Liu, Z.
        and R. Price, "Signaling Compression (SigComp) - Extended
        Operations", RFC 3321, January 2003.

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 18]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

Non-Normative References

   [3]  Rosenberg, J., Schulzrinne, H., Camarillo, G., Johnston, A.,
        Peterson, J., Sparks, R., Handley, M. and E. Schooler, "SIP:
        Session Initiation Protocol", RFC 3261, June 2002.

Author's Address

   Adam Roach
   Estacado Systems

   US

   EMail: adam@estacado.net

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 19]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

Appendix A. IPR Disclosure Acknowledgement

   By submitting this Internet-Draft, I certify that any applicable
   patent or other IPR claims of which I am aware have been disclosed,
   and any of which I become aware will be disclosed, in accordance with
   RFC 3668.

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 20]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

Appendix B. IPR Notice

   The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any
   Intellectual Property Rights or other rights that might be claimed to
   pertain to the implementation or use of the technology described in
   this document or the extent to which any license under such rights
   might or might not be available; nor does it represent that it has
   made any independent effort to identify any such rights.  Information
   on the procedures with respect to rights in RFC documents can be
   found in BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   Copies of IPR disclosures made to the IETF Secretariat and any
   assurances of licenses to be made available, or the result of an
   attempt made to obtain a general license or permission for the use of
   such proprietary rights by implementers or users of this
   specification can be obtained from the IETF on-line IPR repository at
   http://www.ietf.org/ipr.

   The IETF invites any interested party to bring to its attention any
   copyrights, patents or patent applications, or other proprietary
   rights that may cover technology that may be required to implement
   this standard.  Please address the information to the IETF at ietf-
   ipr@ietf.org.

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 21]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

Appendix C. Acknowledgements

   Thanks to Carsten Bormann, Zhigang Liu, Pekka Pessi, and Robert Sugar
   for their comments and suggestions.  Special thanks to Abigail
   Surtees and Richard Price for several very detailed reviews and
   suggestions.

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 22]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

Appendix D. Changes

   This section is to be removed by the RFC editor prior to publication

D.1 Changes since draft-ietf-rohc-sigcomp-nack-01

   o  Closed long-standing open issue about how to indicate and detect
      support for the NACK algorithm.  We now use a SigComp version of
      0x02 to indicate NACK support; all discussion of the use of
      special memory positions or intentionally malformed messages has
      been removed.

   o  Clarified handling of NACKs on reliable transports (connection is
      reset then reestablished).  Also, noted that the compressor should
      act on the NACK in addition to resetting the connection.

   o  Clarified meaning of details for ID_NOT_UNIQUE and
      STATE_TOO_SHORT.

   o  Small editorial updates (correction of typographical errors and
      text clarifications), including removal of some dead text from an
      earlier version of the draft.

D.2 Changes since draft-ietf-rohc-sigcomp-nack-00

   o  Clarified value of SHA-1 hash in framing error case.

   o  Small editorial updates

D.3 Changes since draft-roach-sigcomp-nack-01

   o  Added provision stating that NACKs must be sent *from* the same
      port on which the undecipherable message was received.

   o  Added failed opcode and PC fields to NACK messages.

   o  Removed ID_TOO_SHORT error code (due to security concerns).  This
      case is now covered by STATE_NOT_FOUND.

   o  Added new INVALID_STATE_PROBE, INTERNAL_ERROR, and FRAMING_ERROR
      reason codes.

   o  Renamed BAD_BITORDER to BAD_INPUT_BITORDER for clarity.

   o  Several editorial updates.

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 23]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

D.4 Changes since draft-roach-sigcomp-nack-00

   o  Moved NACK parameters to end of message, so that NACK messages can
      be distinguished from standalone feedback messages

   o  Changed behavior of endpoint receiving a NACK for a message sent
      on a reliable transport.

   o  Clarified some of the motivating text relating to server fail-over

   o  Added mechanism for detection of NACK support

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 24]
Internet-Draft                SigComp NACK                  October 2004

Full Copyright Statement

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004).  This document is subject
   to the rights, licenses and restrictions contained in BCP 78, and
   except as set forth therein, the authors retain all their rights.

   This document and the information contained herein are provided on an
   "AS IS" basis and THE CONTRIBUTOR, THE ORGANIZATION HE/SHE REPRESENTS
   OR IS SPONSORED BY (IF ANY), THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET
   ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
   INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE
   INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED
   WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Acknowledgement

   Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
   Internet Society.

Roach                    Expires April 20, 2005                [Page 25]