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TCP Fast Open
draft-ietf-tcpm-fastopen-08

The information below is for an old version of the document.
Document Type
This is an older version of an Internet-Draft that was ultimately published as RFC 7413.
Authors Yuchung Cheng , Jerry Chu , Sivasankar Radhakrishnan , Arvind Jain
Last updated 2014-06-16 (Latest revision 2014-03-11)
Replaces draft-cheng-tcpm-fastopen
RFC stream Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
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Additional resources Mailing list discussion
Stream WG state Submitted to IESG for Publication
Document shepherd Michael Scharf
Shepherd write-up Show Last changed 2014-04-29
IESG IESG state Became RFC 7413 (Experimental)
Consensus boilerplate Unknown
Telechat date (None)
Responsible AD Martin Stiemerling
Send notices to tcpm-chairs@tools.ietf.org, draft-ietf-tcpm-fastopen@tools.ietf.org
draft-ietf-tcpm-fastopen-08
Internet Draft                                                  Y. Cheng
draft-ietf-tcpm-fastopen-08.txt                                   J. Chu
Intended status: Experimental                           S. Radhakrishnan
Expiration date: August, 2014                                    A. Jain
                                                            Google, Inc.
                                                          March 11, 2014

                             TCP Fast Open

Abstract

   This document describes an experimental TCP mechanism TCP Fast Open
   (TFO). TFO allows data to be carried in the SYN and SYN-ACK packets
   and consumed by the receiving end during the initial connection
   handshake, thus saving up to one full round trip time (RTT) compared
   to the standard TCP, which requires a three-way handshake (3WHS) to
   complete before data can be exchanged. However TFO deviates from the
   standard TCP semantics since the data in the SYN could be replayed to
   an application in some rare circumstances. Applications should not
   use TFO unless they can tolerate this issue detailed in the
   Applicability section.

Status of this Memo

   Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

   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/1id-abstracts.html

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

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2014 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors. All rights reserved.
 

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   This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
   Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
   (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
   publication of this document. Please review these documents
   carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
   to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
   include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
   the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
   described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

   1. Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
     1.1 Terminology  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   2. Data In SYN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
     2.1 Relaxing TCP Semantics on Duplicated SYNs  . . . . . . . . .  4
     2.2. SYNs with Spoofed IP Addresses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   3. Protocol Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
   4. Protocol Details  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
     4.1. Fast Open Cookie  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
       4.1.1. TCP Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
       4.1.2. Server Cookie Handling  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
       4.1.3. Client Cookie Handling  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  9
         4.1.3.1 Client Caching Negative Responses  . . . . . . . . .  9
     4.2. Fast Open Protocol  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
       4.2.1. Fast Open Cookie Request  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
       4.2.2. TCP Fast Open . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
   5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
     5.1. Resource Exhaustion Attack by SYN Flood with Valid 
          Cookies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
       5.1.1 Attacks from behind Shared Public IPs (NATs) . . . . . . 14
     5.2. Amplified Reflection Attack to Random Host  . . . . . . . . 15
   6. TFO's Applicability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
     6.1 Duplicate Data in SYNs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
     6.2 Potential Performance Improvement  . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
     6.3. Example: Web Clients and Servers  . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
       6.3.1. HTTP Request Replay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
       6.3.2. Speculative Connections by the Applications . . . . . . 17
       6.3.3. HTTP over TLS (HTTPS) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
       6.3.4. Comparison with HTTP Persistent Connections . . . . . . 17
   7. Open Areas for Experimentation  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
     7.1. Performance impact due to middle-boxes and NAT  . . . . . . 18
     7.2. Cookie-less Fast Open . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
     7.3 Impact on congestion control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
   8. Related Work  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
     8.1. T/TCP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
     8.2. Common Defenses Against SYN Flood Attacks . . . . . . . . . 20
     8.3. TCP Cookie Transaction (TCPCT)  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
 

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   9. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
   10. Acknowledgement  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
   11. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
     11.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
     11.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
   Appendix A. Example Socket API Changes to support TFO  . . . . . . 23
     A.1 Active Open  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
     A.2 Passive Open . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
   Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

1. Introduction

   TCP Fast Open (TFO) is an experimental update to TCP that enables
   data to be exchanged safely during TCP's connection handshake. This
   document describes a design that enables applications to save a round
   trip while avoiding severe security ramifications. At the core of TFO
   is a security cookie used by the server side to authenticate a client
   initiating a TFO connection. This document covers the details of
   exchanging data during TCP's initial handshake, the protocol for TFO
   cookies, potential new security vulnerabilities and their mitigation,
   and the new socket API.

   TFO is motivated by the performance needs of today's Web
   applications. Current TCP only permits data exchange after the 3-way
   handshake (3WHS)[RFC793], which adds one RTT to network latency. For
   short Web transfers this additional RTT is a significant portion of
   overall network latency, even when HTTP persistent connection is
   widely used. For example, the Chrome browser keeps TCP connections
   idle for up to 5 minutes but 35% of Chrome HTTP requests are made on
   new TCP connections [RCCJR11]. For such Web and Web-like applications
   placing data in the SYN can yield significant latency improvements. 
   Next we describe how we resolve the challenges that arise upon doing
   so.

1.1 Terminology

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].
   TFO refers to TCP Fast Open. Client refers to the TCP's active open
   side and server refers to the TCP's passive open side.

 

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2. Data In SYN

   Standard TCP already allows data to be carried in SYN packets
   ([RFC793], section 3.4) but forbids the receiver from delivering it
   to the application until 3WHS is completed. This is because TCP's
   initial handshake serves to capture old or duplicate SYNs.

   To enable applications exchange data in TCP handshake, TFO removes
   the constraint and allows data in SYN packets to be delivered to the
   application. This change of TCP semantic raises two issues discussed
   in the following subsections, making TFO unsuitable for certain
   applications.

   Therefore TCP implementations MUST NOT use TFO by default, but only
   use TFO if requested explicitly by the application on a per service
   port basis. Applications need to evaluate TFO applicability described
   in Section 6 before using TFO.

2.1 Relaxing TCP Semantics on Duplicated SYNs

   TFO allows data to be delivered to the application before the 3WHS 
   is completed, thus opening itself to a data integrity issue in either
   of the two cases below:

   a) the receiver host receives data in a duplicate SYN after it has  
   forgotten it received the original SYN (e.g. due to a reboot);

   b) the duplicate is received after the connection created by the  
   original SYN has been closed and the close was initiated by the  
   sender (so the receiver will not be protected by the 2MSL TIMEWAIT  
   state).

   The now obsoleted T/TCP [RFC1644] attempted to address these issues.
   It was not successful and not deployed due to various vulnerabilities
   as described in the Related Work section. Rather than trying to
   capture all dubious SYN packets to make TFO 100% compatible with TCP
   semantics, we made a design decision early on to accept old SYN
   packets with data, i.e., to restrict TFO use to a class of
   applications (Section 6) that are tolerant of duplicate SYN packets
   with data. We believe this is the right design trade-off balancing
   complexity with usefulness.

2.2. SYNs with Spoofed IP Addresses

   Standard TCP suffers from the SYN flood attack [RFC4987] because SYN
   packets with spoofed source IP addresses can easily fill up a
   listener's small queue, causing a service port to be blocked
   completely until timeouts.
 

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   TFO goes one step further to allow server-side TCP to send up data to
   the application layer before 3WHS is completed. This opens up serious
   new vulnerabilities. Applications serving ports that have TFO enabled
   may waste lots of CPU and memory resources processing the requests
   and producing the responses. If the response is much larger than the
   request, the attacker can further mount an amplified reflection
   attack against victims of choice beyond the TFO server itself.

   Numerous mitigation techniques against regular SYN flood attacks
   exist and have been well documented [RFC4987]. Unfortunately none are
   applicable to TFO. We propose a server-supplied cookie to mitigate
   these new vulnerabilities in Section 3 and evaluate the effectiveness
   of the defense in Section 7.

3. Protocol Overview

   The key component of TFO is the Fast Open Cookie (cookie), a message
   authentication code (MAC) tag generated by the server. The client
   requests a cookie in one regular TCP connection, then uses it for
   future TCP connections to exchange data during 3WHS:

   Requesting a Fast Open Cookie:

   1. The client sends a SYN with a Fast Open Cookie Request option.

   2. The server generates a cookie and sends it through the Fast Open
      Cookie option of a SYN-ACK packet.

   3. The client caches the cookie for future TCP Fast Open connections
      (see below).

   Performing TCP Fast Open:

   1. The client sends a SYN with Fast Open Cookie option and data.

   2. The server validates the cookie:
      a. If the cookie is valid, the server sends a SYN-ACK
         acknowledging both the SYN and the data. The server then
         delivers the data to the application.

      b. Otherwise, the server drops the data and sends a SYN-ACK
         acknowledging only the SYN sequence number.

   3. If the server accepts the data in the SYN packet, it may send the
      response data before the handshake finishes. The maximum amount is
      governed by the TCP's congestion control [RFC5681].

   4. The client sends an ACK acknowledging the SYN and the server data.
 

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      If the client's data is not acknowledged, the client retransmits
      the data in the ACK packet.

   5. The rest of the connection proceeds like a normal TCP connection.
      The client can repeat many Fast Open operations once it acquires a
      cookie (until the cookie is expired by the server). Thus TFO is
      useful for applications that have temporal locality on client and
      server connections.

   Requesting Fast Open Cookie in connection 1:

   TCP A (Client)                                       TCP B(Server)
   ______________                                       _____________
   CLOSED                                                      LISTEN

   #1 SYN-SENT       ----- <SYN,CookieOpt=NIL>  ---------->  SYN-RCVD

   #2 ESTABLISHED    <---- <SYN,ACK,CookieOpt=C> ----------  SYN-RCVD
   (caches cookie C)

   Performing TCP Fast Open in connection 2:

   TCP A (Client)                                       TCP B(Server)
   ______________                                       _____________
   CLOSED                                                      LISTEN

   #1 SYN-SENT       ----- <SYN=x,CookieOpt=C,DATA_A> ---->  SYN-RCVD

   #2 ESTABLISHED    <---- <SYN=y,ACK=x+len(DATA_A)+1> ----  SYN-RCVD

   #3 ESTABLISHED    <---- <ACK=x+len(DATA_A)+1,DATA_B>----  SYN-RCVD

   #4 ESTABLISHED    ----- <ACK=y+1>--------------------> ESTABLISHED

   #5 ESTABLISHED    --- <ACK=y+len(DATA_B)+1>----------> ESTABLISHED

 

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4. Protocol Details

4.1. Fast Open Cookie

   The Fast Open Cookie is designed to mitigate new security
   vulnerabilities in order to enable data exchange during handshake.
   The cookie is a message authentication code tag generated by the
   server and is opaque to the client; the client simply caches the
   cookie and passes it back on subsequent SYN packets to open new
   connections. The server can expire the cookie at any time to enhance
   security.

4.1.1. TCP Options

   Fast Open Cookie Option

   The server uses this option to grant a cookie to the client in the
   SYN-ACK packet; the client uses it to pass the cookie back to the
   server in subsequent SYN packets.

                                   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
                                   |      Kind     |    Length     |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |                                                               |
   ~                            Cookie                             ~
   |                                                               |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

   Kind            1 byte: constant TBD (assigned by IANA)
   Length          1 byte: range 6 to 18 (bytes); limited by
                           remaining space in the options field.
                           The number MUST be even.
   Cookie          4 to 16 bytes (Length - 2)
   Options with invalid Length values or without SYN flag set MUST be
   ignored.  The minimum Cookie size is 4 bytes. Although the diagram
   shows a cookie aligned on 32-bit boundaries, alignment is not
   required.

   Fast Open Cookie Request Option

   The client uses this option in the SYN packet to request a cookie
   from a TFO-enabled server
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
   |      Kind     |    Length     |
   +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

   Kind            1 byte: same as the Fast Open Cookie option
   Length          1 byte: constant 2. This distinguishes the option
 

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                           from the Fast Open cookie option.
   Options with invalid Length values, without SYN flag set, or with ACK
   flag set MUST be ignored.

4.1.2. Server Cookie Handling

   The server is in charge of cookie generation and authentication. The
   cookie SHOULD be a message authentication code tag with the following
   properties:
   1. The cookie authenticates the client's (source) IP address of the
      SYN packet. The IP address may be an IPv4 or IPv6 address.

   2. The cookie can only be generated by the server and can not be
      fabricated by any other parties including the client.

   3. The generation and verification are fast relative to the rest of
      SYN and SYN-ACK processing.

   4. A server may encode other information in the cookie, and accept
      more than one valid cookie per client at any given time. But this
      is server implementation dependent and transparent to the
      client.

   5. The cookie expires after a certain amount of time. The reason for
      cookie expiration is detailed in the "Security Consideration"
      section. This can be done by either periodically changing the
      server key used to generate cookies or including a timestamp when
      generating the cookie.

      To gradually invalidate cookies over time, the server can
      implement key rotation to generate and verify cookies using
      multiple keys. This approach is useful for large-scale servers to
      retain Fast Open rolling key updates. We do not specify a
      particular mechanism because the implementation is server
      specific.

   The server supports the cookie generation and verification
   operations:

   - GetCookie(IP_Address): returns a (new) cookie

   - IsCookieValid(IP_Address, Cookie): checks if the cookie is valid,
   i.e., it has not expired and it authenticates the client IP address.

   Example Implementation: a simple implementation is to use AES_128 to
   encrypt the IPv4 (with padding) or IPv6 address and truncate to 64
   bits. The server can periodically update the key to expire the
   cookies. AES encryption on recent processors is fast and takes only a
 

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   few hundred nanoseconds [RCCJR11].

   If only one valid cookie is allowed per-IP and the server can
   regenerate the cookie independently, the best validation process is
   to simply regenerate a valid cookie and compare it against the
   incoming cookie. In that case if the incoming cookie fails the check,
   a valid cookie is readily available to be sent to the client.

4.1.3. Client Cookie Handling

   The client MUST cache cookies from servers for later Fast Open
   connections. For a multi-homed client, the cookies are both client
   and server IP dependent. Beside the cookie we RECOMMEND that the
   client caches the MSS to the server to enhance performance.

   The MSS advertised by the server is stored in the cache to determine
   the maximum amount of data that can be supported in the SYN packet.
   This information is needed because data is sent before the server
   announces its MSS in the SYN-ACK packet. Without this information,
   the data size in the SYN packet is limited to the default MSS of 536
   bytes for IPv4 [RFC1122] and 1240 bytes for IPv6 [RFC2460]. In
   particular it's known an IPv4 receiver advertised MSS less than 536
   bytes would result in transmission of an unexpected large segment. If
   the cache MSS is larger than the typical 1460 bytes, the extra large
   data in SYN segment may have issues that offsets the performance
   benefit of Fast Open. For examples, the super-size SYN may trigger IP
   fragmentation and may confuse firewall or middle-boxes, causing SYN
   retransmission and other side-effects. Therefore the client MAY limit
   the cached MSS to 1460 bytes.

4.1.3.1 Client Caching Negative Responses

   The client MUST cache negative responses from the server in order to
   avoid potential connection failures. Negative responses include
   server not acknowledging the data in SYN, ICMP error messages, and
   most importantly no response (SYN/ACK) from the server at all, i.e.,
   connection timeout. The last case is likely due to incompatible
   middle-boxes or firewall blocking the connection completely after it
   sees data in SYN. If the client does not react to these negative
   responses and continue to retry Fast Open, the client may never be
   able to connect to the specific server. 

   For any negative responses, the client SHOULD disable Fast Open on
   the specific path (the source and destination IP addresses and ports)
   at least temporarily. Since TFO is enabled on a per-service port
   basis but cookies are independent of service ports, the client's
   cache should include remote port numbers too.

 

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4.2. Fast Open Protocol

   One predominant requirement of TFO is to be fully compatible with
   existing TCP implementations, both on the client and the server
   sides.

   The server keeps two variables per listening port:

   FastOpenEnabled: default is off. It MUST be turned on explicitly by
   the application. When this flag is off, the server does not perform
   any TFO related operations and MUST ignore all cookie options.

   PendingFastOpenRequests: tracks number of TFO connections in SYN-RCVD
   state.  If this variable goes over a preset system limit, the server
   MUST disable TFO for all new connection requests until
   PendingFastOpenRequests drops below the system limit. This variable
   is used for defending some vulnerabilities discussed in the "Security
   Considerations" section.

   The server keeps a FastOpened flag per connection to mark if a
   connection has successfully performed a TFO.

4.2.1. Fast Open Cookie Request

   Any client attempting TFO MUST first request a cookie from the server
   with the following steps:

   1. The client sends a SYN packet with a Fast Open Cookie Request
      option.

   2. The server SHOULD respond with a SYN-ACK based on the procedures
      in the "Server Cookie Handling" section. This SYN-ACK SHOULD
      contain a Fast Open Cookie option if the server currently supports
      TFO for this listener port.

   3. If the SYN-ACK contains a Fast Open Cookie option, the client
      replaces the cookie and other information as described in the
      "Client Cookie Handling" section. Otherwise, if the SYN-ACK is
      first seen, i.e., not a (spurious) retransmission, the client MAY
      remove the server information from the cookie cache. If the SYN-
      ACK is a spurious retransmission without valid Fast Open Cookie
      Option, the client does nothing to the cookie cache for the
      reasons below.

   The network or servers may drop the SYN or SYN-ACK packets with the
   new cookie options, which will cause SYN or SYN-ACK timeouts. We
   RECOMMEND both the client and the server to retransmit SYN and SYN-
   ACK without the cookie options on timeouts. This ensures the
 

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   connections of cookie requests will go through and lowers the latency
   penalty (of dropped SYN/SYN-ACK packets). The obvious downside for
   maximum compatibility is that any regular SYN drop will fail the
   cookie (although one can argue the delay in the data transmission
   till after 3WHS is justified if the SYN drop is due to network
   congestion).  Next section describes a heuristic to detect such drops
   when the client receives the SYN-ACK.

   We also RECOMMEND the client to record the set of servers that failed
   to respond to cookie requests and only attempt another cookie request
   after certain period.

   An alternate proposal is to request a TFO cookie in the FIN instead,
   since FIN-drop by incompatible middle-boxes does not affect latency.
   However paths that block SYN cookies may be more likely to drop a
   later SYN packet with data, and many applications close a connection
   with RST instead anyway.

   Although cookie-in-FIN may not improve robustness, it would give
   clients using a single connection a latency advantage over clients
   opening multiple parallel connections. If experiments with TFO find
   that it leads to increased connection-sharding, cookie-in-FIN may
   prove to be a useful alternative.

4.2.2. TCP Fast Open

   Once the client obtains the cookie from the target server, it can
   perform subsequent TFO connections until the cookie is expired by the
   server.

   Client: Sending SYN

   To open a TFO connection, the client MUST have obtained a cookie from
   the server:

   1. Send a SYN packet.

      a. If the SYN packet does not have enough option space for the
      Fast Open Cookie option, abort TFO and fall back to regular 3WHS.

      b. Otherwise, include the Fast Open Cookie option with the cookie
      of the server. Include any data up to the cached server MSS or
      default 536 bytes.

   2. Advance to SYN-SENT state and update SND.NXT to include the data
      accordingly.

 

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   To deal with network or servers dropping SYN packets with payload or
   unknown options, when the SYN timer fires, the client SHOULD
   retransmit a SYN packet without data and Fast Open Cookie options.

   Server: Receiving SYN and responding with SYN-ACK

   Upon receiving the SYN packet with Fast Open Cookie option:

   1. Initialize and reset a local FastOpened flag. If FastOpenEnabled
      is false, go to step 5.

   2. If PendingFastOpenRequests is over the system limit, go to step 5.

   3. If IsCookieValid() in section 4.1.2 returns false, go to step 5.

   4. Buffer the data and notify the application. Set FastOpened flag
      and increment PendingFastOpenRequests.

   5. Send the SYN-ACK packet. The packet MAY include a Fast Open
      Option. If FastOpened flag is set, the packet acknowledges the SYN
      and data sequence. Otherwise it acknowledges only the SYN
      sequence. The server MAY include data in the SYN-ACK packet if the
      response data is readily available. Some application may favor
      delaying the SYN-ACK, allowing the application to process the
      request in order to produce a response, but this is left up to the
      implementation.

   6. Advance to the SYN-RCVD state. If the FastOpened flag is set, the
      server MUST follow [RFC5681] (based on [RFC3390]) to set the
      initial congestion window for sending more data packets.

   If the SYN-ACK timer fires, the server SHOULD retransmit a SYN-ACK
   segment with neither data nor Fast Open Cookie options for
   compatibility reasons.

   A special case is simultaneous open where the SYN receiver is a
   client in SYN-SENT state. The protocol remains the same because
   [RFC793] already supports both data in SYN and simultaneous open. But
   the client's socket may have data available to read before it's
   connected. This document does not cover the corresponding API change.

   Client: Receiving SYN-ACK

   The client SHOULD perform the following steps upon receiving the SYN-
   ACK:

   1. Update the cookie cache if the SYN-ACK has a Fast Open Cookie
 

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      Option or MSS option or both.

   2. Send an ACK packet. Set acknowledgment number to RCV.NXT and
      include the data after SND.UNA if data is available.

   3. Advance to the ESTABLISHED state.

   Note there is no latency penalty if the server does not acknowledge
   the data in the original SYN packet. The client SHOULD retransmit any
   unacknowledged data in the first ACK packet in step 2. The data
   exchange will start after the handshake like a regular TCP
   connection.

   If the client has timed out and retransmitted only regular SYN
   packets, it can heuristically detect paths that intentionally drop
   SYN with Fast Open option or data. If the SYN-ACK acknowledges only
   the initial sequence and does not carry a Fast Open cookie option,
   presumably it is triggered by a retransmitted (regular) SYN and the
   original SYN or the corresponding SYN-ACK was lost.

   Server: Receiving ACK

   Upon receiving an ACK acknowledging the SYN sequence, the server
   decrements PendingFastOpenRequests and advances to the ESTABLISHED
   state. No special handling is required further.

5. Security Considerations

   The Fast Open cookie stops an attacker from trivially flooding
   spoofed SYN packets with data to burn server resources or to mount an
   amplified reflection attack on random hosts. The server can defend
   against spoofed SYN floods with invalid cookies using existing
   techniques [RFC4987]. We note that although generating bogus cookies
   is cost-free, the cost of validating the cookies, inherent to any
   authentication scheme, may be substantial compared to processing a
   regular SYN packet. We describe these new vulnerabilities of TFO and
   the countermeasures in detail below.

5.1. Resource Exhaustion Attack by SYN Flood with Valid Cookies

   An attacker may still obtain cookies from some compromised hosts,
   then flood spoofed SYN with data and "valid" cookies (from these
   hosts or other vantage points). Like regular TCP handshakes, TFO is
   vulnerable to such an attack. But the potential damage can be much
   more severe. Besides causing temporary disruption to service ports
   under attack, it may exhaust server CPU and memory resources. Such an
   attack will show up on application server logs as a application level
   DoS from Bot-nets, triggering other defenses and alerts.
 

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   To protect the server it is important to limit the maximum number of
   total pending TFO connection requests, i.e., PendingFastOpenRequests
   (Section 4.2). When the limit is exceeded, the server temporarily
   disables TFO entirely as described in "Server Cookie Handling". Then
   subsequent TFO requests will be downgraded to regular connection
   requests, i.e., with the data dropped and only SYN acknowledged. This
   allows regular SYN flood defense techniques [RFC4987] like SYN-
   cookies to kick in and prevent further service disruption.

   The main impact of SYN floods against the standard TCP stack is not
   directly from the floods themselves costing TCP processing overhead
   or host memory, but rather from the spoofed SYN packets filling up
   the often small listener's queue.

   On the other hand, TFO SYN floods can cause damage directly if
   admitted without limit into the stack. The RST packets from the
   spoofed host will fuel rather than defeat the SYN floods as compared
   to the non-TFO case, because the attacker can flood more SYNs with
   data to cost more data processing resources. For this reason, a TFO
   server needs to monitor the connections in SYN-RCVD being reset in
   addition to imposing a reasonable max queue length. Implementations
   may combine the two, e.g., by continuing to account for those
   connection requests that have just been reset against the listener's
   PendingFastOpenRequests until a timeout period has passed.

   Limiting the maximum number of pending TFO connection requests does
   make it easy for an attacker to overflow the queue, causing TFO to be
   disabled. We argue that causing TFO to be disabled is unlikely to be
   of interest to attackers because the service will remain intact
   without TFO hence there is hardly any real damage.

5.1.1 Attacks from behind Shared Public IPs (NATs)

   An attacker behind a NAT can easily obtain valid cookies to launch
   the above attack to hurt other clients that share the path.
   [BRISCOE12] suggested that the server can extend cookie generation to
   include the TCP timestamp---GetCookie(IP_Address, Timestamp)---and
   implement it by encrypting the concatenation of the two values to
   generate the cookie. The client stores both the cookie and its
   corresponding timestamp, and echoes both in the SYN. The server then
   implements IsCookieValid(IP_Address, Timestamp, Cookie) by encrypting
   the IP and timestamp data and comparing it with the cookie value.

   This enables the server to issue different cookies to clients that
   share the same IP address, hence can selectively discard those
   misused cookies from the attacker. However the attacker can simply
   repeat the attack with new cookies. The server would eventually need
   to throttle all requests from the IP address just like the current
 

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   approach. Moreover this approach requires modifying [RFC1323] to send
   non-zero Timestamp Echo Reply in SYN, potentially cause firewall
   issues. Therefore we believe the benefit does not outweigh the
   drawbacks.

5.2. Amplified Reflection Attack to Random Host

   Limiting PendingFastOpenRequests with a system limit can be done
   without Fast Open Cookies and would protect the server from resource
   exhaustion. It would also limit how much damage an attacker can cause
   through an amplified reflection attack from that server. However, it
   would still be vulnerable to an amplified reflection attack from a
   large number of servers. An attacker can easily cause damage by
   tricking many servers to respond with data packets at once to any
   spoofed victim IP address of choice.

   With the use of Fast Open Cookies, the attacker would first have to
   steal a valid cookie from its target victim. This likely requires the
   attacker to compromise the victim host or network first. But in some
   case it may be relatively easy.

   The attacker here has little interest in mounting an attack on the
   victim host that has already been compromised. But it may be
   motivated to disrupt the victim's network. Since a stolen cookie is
   only valid for a single server, it has to steal valid cookies from a
   large number of servers and use them before they expire to cause
   sufficient damage without triggering the defense.

   One can argue that if the attacker has compromised the target network
   or hosts, it could perform a similar but simpler attack by injecting
   bits directly. The degree of damage will be identical, but TFO-
   specific attack allows the attacker to remain anonymous and disguises
   the attack as from other servers.

   For example with DHCP an attacker can obtain cookies when he (or the
   host he has compromised) owns a particular IP address by performing
   regular Fast Open to servers supporting TFO and collect valid
   cookies. The attacker then actively or passively releases his IP
   address. When the IP address is re-assigned to a victim, the attacker
   now owning a different IP address, floods spoofed Fast Open requests
   to perform an amplified reflection attack on the victim.

   The best defense is for the server not to respond with data until
   handshake finishes. In this case the risk of amplification reflection
   attack is completely eliminated. But the potential latency saving
   from TFO may diminish if the server application produces responses
   earlier before the handshake completes.

 

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6. TFO's Applicability

   This section is to help applications considering TFO to evaluate
   TFO's benefits and drawbacks using the Web client and server
   applications as an example throughout. Applications here refer
   specifically to the process that writes data into the socket, i.e., a
   JavaScript process that sends data to the server. A proposed socket
   API change is in the Appendix.

6.1 Duplicate Data in SYNs

   It is possible that using TFO results in the first data written to a
   socket to be delivered more than once to the application on the
   remote host (Section 2.1). This replay potential only applies to data
   in the SYN but not subsequent data exchanges.

   Empirically [JIDKT07] showed the packet duplication on a Tier-1
   network is rare. Since the replay only happens specifically when the
   SYN data packet is duplicated and also the duplicate arrives after
   the receiver has cleared the original SYN's connection state, the
   replay is thought to be uncommon in practice. Neverthless a client
   that cannot handle receiving the same SYN data more than once MUST
   NOT enable TFO to send data in a SYN. Similarly a server that cannot
   accept receiving the same SYN data more than once MUST NOT enable TFO
   to receive data in a SYN.

6.2 Potential Performance Improvement

   TFO is designed for latency-conscious applications that are sensitive
   to TCP's initial connection setup delay. To benefit from TFO, the
   first application data unit (e.g., an HTTP request) needs to be no
   more than TCP's maximum segment size (minus options used in SYN).
   Otherwise the remote server can only process the client's application
   data unit once the rest of it is delivered after the initial
   handshake, diminishing TFO's benefit.

   To the extent possible, applications SHOULD reuse the connection to
   take advantage of TCP's built-in congestion control and reduce
   connection setup overhead. An application that employs too many
   short-lived connections will negatively impact network stability, as
   these connections often exit before TCP's congestion control
   algorithm takes effect.

 

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6.3. Example: Web Clients and Servers

6.3.1. HTTP Request Replay

   While TFO is motivated by Web applications, the browser should not
   use TFO to send requests in SYNs if those requests cannot tolerate
   replays. One example is POST requests without application-layer
   transaction protection (e.g., a unique identifier in the request
   header).

   On the other hand, TFO is particularly useful for GET requests.
   Although not all GET requests are idem-potent, GETs are frequently
   replayed today across striped TCP connections: after a server
   receives an HTTP request but before the ACKs of the requests reach
   the browser, the browser may timeout and retry the same request on
   another (possibly new) TCP connection. This differs from a TFO replay
   only in that the replay is initiated by the browser, not by the TCP
   stack.

6.3.2. Speculative Connections by the Applications

   Some Web browsers maintain a history of the domains for frequently
   visited web pages. The browsers then speculatively pre-open TCP
   connections to these domains before the user initiates any requests
   for them [BELSHE11]. While this technique also saves the handshake
   latency, it wastes server and network resources by initiating and
   maintaining idle connections.

6.3.3. HTTP over TLS (HTTPS)

   For TLS over TCP, it is safe and useful to include TLS CLIENT_HELLO
   in the SYN packet to save one RTT in TLS handshake. There is no
   concern about violating idem-potency. In particular it can be used
   alone with the speculative connection above.

6.3.4. Comparison with HTTP Persistent Connections

   Is TFO useful given the wide deployment of HTTP persistent
   connections? The short answer is yes. Studies [RCCJR11][AERG11] show
   that the average number of transactions per connection is between 2
   and 4, based on large-scale measurements from both servers and
   clients. In these studies, the servers and clients both kept idle
   connections up to several minutes, well into "human think" time.

   Keeping connections open and idle even longer risks a greater
   performance penalty. [HNESSK10][MQXMZ11] show that the majority of
   home routers and ISPs fail to meet the the 124-minute idle timeout
   mandated in [RFC5382]. In [MQXMZ11], 35% of mobile ISPs silently
 

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   timeout idle connections within 30 minutes. End hosts, unaware of
   silent middle-box timeouts, suffer multi-minute TCP timeouts upon
   using those long-idle connections.

   To circumvent this problem, some applications send frequent TCP keep-
   alive probes. However, this technique drains power on mobile devices
   [MQXMZ11]. In fact, power has become such a prominent issue in modern
   LTE devices that mobile browsers close HTTP connections within
   seconds or even immediately [SOUDERS11].

   [RCCJR11] studied Chrome browser performance based on 28 days of
   global statistics. The Chrome browser keeps idle HTTP persistent
   connections for 5 to 10 minutes. However the average number of the
   transactions per connection is only 3.3 and TCP 3WHS accounts for up
   to 25% of the HTTP transaction network latency. The authors estimated
   that TFO improves page load time by 10% to 40% on selected popular
   Web sites.

7. Open Areas for Experimentation

   We now outline some areas that need experimentation in the Internet
   and under different network scenarios. These experiments should help
   the community evaluate Fast Open benefits and risks towards further
   standardization and implementation of Fast Open and its related
   protocols.

7.1. Performance impact due to middle-boxes and NAT

   [MAF04] found that some middle-boxes and end-hosts may drop packets
   with unknown TCP options. Studies [LANGLEY06, HNRGHT11] both found
   that 6% of the probed paths on the Internet drop SYN packets with
   data or with unknown TCP options. The TFO protocol deals with this
   problem by falling back to regular TCP handshake and re-transmitting
   SYN without data or cookie options after the initial SYN timeout.
   Moreover the implementation is recommended to negatively cache such
   incidents to avoid recurring timeouts. Further study is required to
   evaluate the performance impact of these malicious drop behaviors.

   Another interesting study is the (loss of) TFO performance benefit
   behind certain carrier-grade NAT. Typically hosts behind a NAT
   sharing the same IP address will get the same cookie for the same
   server. This will not prevent TFO from working. But on some carrier-
   grade NAT configurations where every new TCP connection from the same
   physical host uses a different public IP address, TFO does not
   provide latency benefits. However, there is no performance penalty
   either, as described in Section "Client: Receiving SYN-ACK".

 

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7.2. Cookie-less Fast Open

   The cookie mechanism mitigates resource exhaustion and amplification
   attacks. However cookies are not necessary if the server has
   application-level protection or is immune to these attacks. For
   example a Web server that only replies with a simple HTTP redirect
   response that fits in the SYN-ACK packet may not care about resource
   exhaustion. For such an application, the server could decide to
   disable TFO cookie checks.

   Disabling cookies (i.e., no Fast Open TCP options in SYN and SYN/ACK)
   simplifies both the client and the server, as the client no longer
   needs to request a cookie and the server no longer needs to check or
   generate cookies. Disabling cookies also potentially simplifies
   configuration, as the server no longer needs a key. It may be
   preferable to enable SYN cookies and disable TFO [RFC4987] when a
   server is overloaded by a large-scale Bot-net attack.

   Careful experimentation is necessary to evaluate if cookie-less TFO
   is practical. The implementation can provide an experimental feature
   to allow zero length, or null, cookies as opposed to the minimum 4
   bytes cookies. Thus the server may return a null cookie and the
   client will send data in SYN with it subsequently. If the server
   believes it's under a DoS attack through other defense mechanisms, it
   can switch to regular Fast Open for listener sockets.

7.3 Impact on congestion control

   Although TFO does not directly change the congestion control, there
   are subtle cases that it may. When SYN-ACK times out, regular TCP
   reduces the initial congestion window before sending any data
   [RFC5681]. However in TFO the server may have already sent up to an
   initial window of data.

   If the server serves mostly short connections then the losses of SYN-
   ACKs are not as effective as regular TCP on reducing the congestion
   window. This could result in an unstable network condition. The
   connections that experience losses may attempt again and add more
   load under congestion. A potential solution is to temporarily disable
   Fast Open if the server observes many SYN-ACK or data losses during
   the handshake across connections. Further experimentation regarding
   the congestion control impact will be useful.

 

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8. Related Work

8.1. T/TCP

   TCP Extensions for Transactions [RFC1644] attempted to bypass the
   three-way handshake, among other things, hence shared the same goal
   but also the same set of issues as TFO. It focused most of its effort
   battling old or duplicate SYNs, but paid no attention to security
   vulnerabilities it introduced when bypassing 3WHS [PHRACK98].

   As stated earlier, we take a practical approach to focus TFO on the
   security aspect, while allowing old, duplicate SYN packets with data
   after recognizing that 100% TCP semantics is likely infeasible. We
   believe this approach strikes the right tradeoff, and makes TFO much
   simpler and more appealing to TCP implementers and users.

8.2. Common Defenses Against SYN Flood Attacks

   [RFC4987] studies on mitigating attacks from regular SYN flood, i.e.,
   SYN without data. But from the stateless SYN-cookies to the stateful
   SYN Cache, none can preserve data sent with SYN safely while still
   providing an effective defense.

   The best defense may be to simply disable TFO when a host is
   suspected to be under a SYN flood attack, e.g., the SYN backlog is
   filled. Once TFO is disabled, normal SYN flood defenses can be
   applied. The "Security Consideration" section contains a thorough
   discussion on this topic.

8.3. TCP Cookie Transaction (TCPCT)

   TCPCT [RFC6013] eliminates server state during initial handshake and
   defends spoofing DoS attacks. Like TFO, TCPCT allows SYN and SYN-ACK
   packets to carry data. But the server can only send up to MSS bytes
   of data during the handshake instead of the initial congestion window
   unlike TFO. Therefore the latency of applications such as Web may be
   worse than with TFO.

9. IANA Considerations

   The Fast Open Cookie Option and Fast Open Cookie Request Option
   define no new namespace. The options require IANA to allocate one
   value from the TCP option Kind namespace. Early implementation before
   the IANA allocation SHOULD follow [RFC6994] and use experimental
   option 254 and magic number 0xF989 (16 bits), then migrate to the new
   option after the allocation accordingly.

 

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10. Acknowledgement

   We thank Bob Briscoe, Michael Scharf, Gorry Fairhurst, Rick Jones,
   Roberto Peon, William Chan, Adam Langley, Neal Cardwell, Eric
   Dumazet, and Matt Mathis for their feedbacks. We especially thank
   Barath Raghavan for his contribution on the security design of Fast
   Open and proofreading this draft numerous times.

11. References

11.1. Normative References

   [RFC793]  Postel, J. "Transmission Control Protocol", RFC 793,
             September 1981.

   [RFC1122] Braden, R., Ed., "Requirements for Internet Hosts -
             Communication Layers", STD 3, RFC 1122, October 1989.

   [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
             Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

   [RFC5382] S. Guha, Ed., Biswas, K., Ford B., Sivakumar S., Srisuresh,
             P., "NAT Behavioral Requirements for TCP", RFC 5382

   [RFC5681] Allman, M., Paxson, V. and E. Blanton, "TCP Congestion
             Control", RFC 5681, September 2009

   [RFC6994] Touch, Joe, "Shared Use of Experimental TCP Options",
             RFC6994, August 2013.

   [RFC3390] Allman, M., Floyd, S., and C. Partridge, "Increasing TCP's
             Initial Window", RFC 3390, October 2002.

11.2. Informative References

   [AERG11]    Al-Fares, M., Elmeleegy, K., Reed, B., Gashinsky, I.,
               "Overclocking the Yahoo! CDN for Faster Web Page Loads".
               In Proceedings of Internet Measurement Conference,
               November 2011.

   [HNESSK10]  Haetoenen, S., Nyrhinen, A., Eggert, L., Strowes, S.,
               Sarolahti, P., Kojo., M., "An Experimental Study of Home
               Gateway Characteristics". In Proceedings of Internet
               Measurement Conference. October 2010

   [HNRGHT11]  Honda, M., Nishida, Y., Raiciu, C., Greenhalgh, A.,
               Handley, M., Tokuda, H., "Is it Still Possible to
               Extend TCP?". In Proceedings of Internet Measurement
 

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               Conference. November 2011.

   [LANGLEY06] Langley, A, "Probing the viability of TCP extensions",
               URL http://www.imperialviolet.org/binary/ecntest.pdf

   [MAF04]     Medina, A., Allman, M., and S. Floyd, "Measuring
               Interactions Between Transport Protocols and
               Middleboxes". In Proceedings of Internet Measurement
               Conference, October 2004.

   [MQXMZ11]   Wang, Z., Qian, Z., Xu, Q., Mao, Z., Zhang, M.,
               "An Untold  Story of Middleboxes in Cellular Networks".
               In Proceedings   of SIGCOMM. August 2011.

   [PHRACK98]  "T/TCP vulnerabilities", Phrack Magazine, Volume 8, Issue
               53 artical 6. July 8, 1998. URL
               http://www.phrack.com/issues.html?issue=53&id=6

   [RCCJR11]   Radhakrishnan, S., Cheng, Y., Chu, J., Jain, A.,
               Raghavan, B., "TCP Fast Open". In Proceedings of 7th
               ACM CoNEXT Conference, December 2011.

   [RFC1323]   Jacobson, V., Braden, R., Borman, D., "TCP Extensions for
               High Performance", RFC 1323, May 1992.

   [RFC1644]   Braden, R., "T/TCP -- TCP Extensions for Transactions
               Functional Specification", RFC 1644, July 1994.

   [RFC2460]   Deering, S., Hinden, R., "Internet Protocol, Version 6
               (IPv6) Specification", RFC 2460, December 1998.

   [RFC4987]   Eddy, W., "TCP SYN Flooding Attacks and Common
               Mitigations", RFC 4987, August 2007.

   [RFC6013]   Simpson, W., "TCP Cookie Transactions (TCPCT)", RFC6013,
               January 2011.

   [SOUDERS11] Souders, S., "Making A Mobile Connection".
               http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2011/09/21/making-a-
               mobile-connection/

   [BRISCOE12] Briscoe, B., "Some ideas building on draft-ietf-tcpm-
               fastopen-01", tcpm list,
               http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tcpm/
               current/msg07192.html

   [BELSHE11]  Belshe, M., "The era of browser preconnect.",
               http://www.belshe.com/2011/02/10/
 

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               the-era-of-browser-preconnect/

   [JIDKT07]   Jaiswal, S., Iannaccone, G., Diot, C., Kurose, J.,
               Towsley, D., "Measurement and classification of
               out-of-sequence packets in a tier-1 IP backbone.".
               IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), 15(1), 54-66.

Appendix A. Example Socket API Changes to support TFO

A.1 Active Open

   The active open side involves changing or replacing the connect()
   call, which does not take a user data buffer argument. We recommend
   replacing connect() call to minimize API changes and hence
   applications to reduce the deployment hurdle.

   One solution implemented in Linux 3.7 is introducing a new flag
   MSG_FASTOPEN for sendto() or sendmsg(). MSG_FASTOPEN marks the
   attempt to send data in SYN like a combination of connect() and
   sendto(), by performing an implicit connect() operation. It blocks
   until the handshake has completed and the data is buffered.

   For non-blocking socket it returns the number of bytes buffered and
   sent in the SYN packet. If the cookie is not available locally, it
   returns -1 with errno EINPROGRESS, and sends a SYN with TFO cookie
   request automatically. The caller needs to write the data again when
   the socket is connected. On errors, it returns the same errno as
   connect() if the handshake fails.

   An implementation may prefer not to change the sendmsg() because TFO
   is a TCP specific feature. A solution is to add a new socket option
   TCP_FASTOPEN for TCP sockets. When the option is enabled before a
   connect operation, sendmsg() or sendto() will perform Fast Open
   operation similar to the MSG_FASTOPEN flag described above. This
   approach however requires an extra setsockopt() system call.

A.2 Passive Open

   The passive open side change is simpler compared to active open side.
   The application only needs to enable the reception of Fast Open
   requests via a new TCP_FASTOPEN setsockopt() socket option before
   listen().

   The option enables Fast Open on the listener socket. The option value
   specifies the PendingFastOpenRequests threshold, i.e., the maximum
   length of pending SYNs with data payload. Once enabled, the TCP
   implementation will respond with TFO cookies per request.

 

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   Traditionally accept() returns only after a socket is connected. But
   for a Fast Open connection, accept() returns upon receiving a SYN
   with a valid Fast Open cookie and data, and the data is available to
   be read through, e.g., recvmsg(), read().

Authors' Addresses

   Yuchung Cheng
   Google, Inc.
   1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
   Mountain View, CA 94043, USA
   EMail: ycheng@google.com

   Jerry Chu
   Google, Inc.
   1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
   Mountain View, CA 94043, USA
   EMail: hkchu@google.com

   Sivasankar Radhakrishnan
   Department of Computer Science and Engineering
   University of California, San Diego
   9500 Gilman Dr
   La Jolla, CA 92093-0404
   EMail: sivasankar@cs.ucsd.edu

   Arvind Jain
   Google, Inc.
   1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
   Mountain View, CA 94043, USA
   EMail: arvind@google.com

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