Patrick,


This may be an excellent topic for a working session at the next IETF.  It 
would be great to hear opinions from others on this topic, since there is 
obviously a gap in the interpretation of the greeting and login services as it 
relates to responses (command responses and poll response) provided by the 
server.



Your description still leaves out a case, that I cannot prove to be the 
dominant one but that is certainly not a negligible one: the client receives 
the message, DOES NOT validate it per XML schema, DOES NOT parse it, and just 
stores it (as is or with a simple transformation to any other serialization 
format, an operation that does not need to know about the schema nor the 
content at all) for out of band later examination, and ACKs it in EPP to be 
able to fetch the next one.



How can the client ack the message if it doesn’t at least parse it for the 
message id?  An EPP client should frame the responses per RFC 5734 and will 
most likely parse the response to determine the result of the command and in 
the case of a poll message parse the message id to send the subsequent poll 
ack.  The client could use regular expressions to extract the information or 
could do a validating DOM parse and object unmarshalling to have something 
easier to work with.  There is no way for the server to know the capabilities 
of the client other than using the login services.  Both sets of clients can be 
fully supported if the server honors the login services sent by the client.  If 
the client wants to retrieve everything from the server for later processing, 
then the client can simply mirror the greeting services into the login 
services.  Clients that do unmarshall responses, will most likely use 
marshalling factories that will be used to dynamically create the login 
services.  This way the server will not send a response that the client does 
not support and will not break the client.



As for "A client would need to proactively deal with the

unexpected if the server does not honor the login services of the

client.", I think this is already the case for many registries, and since a 
long time, so clients had to deal with that already. It is far from a new 
hypothetical problem.



Just because servers have been sending unsolicited extensions to clients does 
not make it correct or appropriate from a protocol perspective.  I believe we 
have examples of EPP extensions (RFC 5910 and draft-ietf-regext-epp-fees) that 
includes language related to what the server should or should not due based on 
the client login services, so this should be understood.  I believe where it is 
not well understood is the handling of poll messages, which would be the point 
in creating a new draft.





If the registrar logs in without the secDNS extension, to use a "core" example, 
and if it does a domain:info on a domain name which has secDNS info (because it 
is one of his own domain for which he put DNSSEC material with it before but 
right now in this particular session it did not use the secDNS extension at 
login, or maybe less contrived before a transfer he does a domain:info with the 
associated authInfo on a domain name it does not sponsor)

then what should the registry do? Send the secDNS part of the domain:info or 
not?

I believe not sending it creates more harm than benefits, even if the registrar 
did not specify it at login, but clearly this is the core point of our 
disagreement.



The registry should not return the secDNS extension in the domain info response 
for a client that does support secDNS-1.0 (RFC 4310) or secDNS-1.1 (RFC 5910) 
according to section 2 of RFC 5910 
(https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5910#page-4).  There is similar language in the 
Registry Fee Extension related to inclusion of the fee extension in the command 
response (e.g., “does include elements in the response, when the extension has 
been selected during a <login> command”).  The login services explicitly 
provide the object and command / response extensions supported by the client 
along with their versions, so why would the server not honor those services to 
determine if and what version of an extension to return to a client?  The 
exchange of the server services in the greeting and the client services in the 
login allow the client and server to negotiate what extensions are supported on 
both sides.  Inclusion of an extension outside of the negotiated services 
should result with an error on the server side and the server should not return 
an unsupported extension back in a response.  The server does not know the 
capabilities of the client, where sending an unsolicitated extension may result 
in a client-side failure in the case for a validating client or a client that 
unmarshalls the response.



—

JG







James Gould

Distinguished Engineer

jgo...@verisign.com



703-948-3271

12061 Bluemont Way

Reston, VA 20190



Verisign.com <http://verisigninc.com/>

On 4/22/18, 3:27 PM, "regext on behalf of Patrick Mevzek" 
<regext-boun...@ietf.org on behalf of p...@dotandco.com> wrote:



    On Fri, Apr 20, 2018, at 16:06, Gould, James wrote:

    > Thank you for the detailed description of your reasoning.  I will leave

    > it that we disagree on the purpose of the login services, the need for

    > the server to honor the login services for poll messaging, and the

    > impacts in returning unsupported responses or response extensions to

    > clients.



    Ok.



    > On the impact, there are two elements to consider including

    > first the XML parser in validating a response against the XML schemas,

    > and second is the unmarshalling of the XML to a representative object.

    > A client could disable the XML parser validation and move along to the

    > unmarshalling step.  In the unmarshalling step the client would need to

    > deal with receipt of unsupported content.  The client could throw an

    > exception because the XML (e.g., DOM tree) could not be unmarshalled,

    > ignore the unsupported content, or come up with some other

    > representation of the unsupported content (e.g., convert to list of XML

    > blobs or DOM objects).  A client would need to proactively deal with the

    > unexpected if the server does not honor the login services of the

    > client.



    Your description still leaves out a case, that I can not prove to be the 
dominant one but that is certainly not a negligible one: the client receives 
the message, DOES NOT validate it per XML schema, DOES NOT parse it, and just 
stores it (as is or with a simple transformation to any other serialization 
format, an operation that does not need to know about the schema nor the 
content at all) for out of band later examination, and ACKs it in EPP to be 
able to fetch the next one.



    In this case, there are absolutely none of the problem you expose:

    the registry has no extra work to do, the registrar has no extra work to do 
to understand messages in unknown namespaces, registrar is not blocked at all 
for any new namespace introduced, the registrar has no problem if the registry 
message does not validate per its own XML schema, the registrar does not have 
to be proactive it can deal with new cases and problems later, etc.

    I really fail to see the drawbacks but of course anyone is free to do 
differently and stick to validate and parse everything in band in real time.



    As for "A client would need to proactively deal with the

    unexpected if the server does not honor the login services of the

    client.", I think this is already the case for many registries, and since a 
long time, so clients had to deal with that already. It is far from a new 
hypothetical problem.



    > Since this is not a problem unique to draft-ietf-regext-change-poll, I

    > agree that it's best suited to be addressed in a separate Internet Draft

    > that addresses service-aware EPP poll messaging.



    I agree this should be a separate draft, to become eventually an 
Informational Standard or a Best Practice depending on its content.



    > Is there interest in such a draft by the working group?



    I am interested by the subject but disagree on the offered solution.



    Also, it may be useful to be able (as difficult as it may be) to understand 
a little more on the current situation, and to see how registries currently 
handle this problem.



    Note that this happens very early and not only from poll messages.

    If the registrar logs in without the secDNS extension, to use a "core" 
example, and if it does a domain:info on a domain name which has secDNS info 
(because it is one of his own domain for which he put DNSSEC material with it 
before but right now in this particular session it did not use the secDNS 
extension at login, or maybe less contrived before a transfer he does a 
domain:info with the associated authInfo on a domain name it does not sponsor)

    then what should the registry do? Send the secDNS part of the domain:info 
or not?

    I believe not sending it creates more harm than benefits, even if the 
registrar did not specify it at login, but clearly this is the core point of 
our disagreement.



    --

      Patrick Mevzek

      p...@dotandco.com



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