Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/drafts/draft_n_r/draft-newman-protocol-design-00.txt

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Network Working Group                                          C. Newman
Internet Draft: Application Protocol Design Principles          Innosoft
Document: draft-newman-protocol-design-00.txt                  June 1997
                                                   Expires in six months


                 Application Protocol Design Principles


Status of this memo

     This document is an Internet-Draft.  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."

     To view the entire list of current Internet-Drafts, please check
     the "1id-abstracts.txt" listing contained in the Internet-Drafts
     Shadow Directories on ftp.is.co.za (Africa), ftp.nordu.net
     (Europe), munnari.oz.au (Pacific Rim), ds.internic.net (US East
     Coast), or ftp.isi.edu (US West Coast).

Abstract

     There are a number of design principles which come into play over
     and over again when designing application protocols.  Many of these
     are entrenched in IETF lore and spread by word of mouth.  Most have
     been learned the hard way many times.

     This is an attempt to codify some of these principles so they can
     be referenced rather than spread by word of mouth.  The author has
     not invented any of these ideas and while the exercise of finding
     the originator of the ideas would be interesting, it is not deemed
     necessary for this project.

     Many of these principles have a much wider scope than application
     protocol design.  However, the author's primary experience is with
     application protocols and examples provided usually involve
     application protocols or elements.

     [Disclaimer: this is a preliminary draft.  Some of the case studies
     and exceptions need tuning.  Suggestions welcome.]



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                           Table of Contents



Status of this memo ...............................................    i
Abstract ..........................................................    i
1.   K.I.S.S.  ....................................................    1
2.   Make the Common Case Simple & Uncommon Case Possible .........    1
3.   0, 1, N Principle ............................................    1
4.   Be Liberal/Conservative ......................................    2
5.   Avoid Silly States ...........................................    3
6.   Text Not Numbers .............................................    3
7.   Avoid Alternative Representations ............................    4
8.   Announce Features, Not Version ...............................    4
9.   Avoid Unnecessary Layers .....................................    5
10.  Conclusions Based on Design Principles .......................    5
11.  Security Considerations ......................................    6
12.  References ...................................................    6
13.  Author's Address .............................................    6





























Newman                                                         [Page ii]

1.   K.I.S.S.

     The "Keep It Simple, Stupid" principle or "KISS" principle is well
     known.  The basic idea is not to add complexity if there is any way
     to avoid it.  Sometimes this also involves a decision of where the
     complexity should live (e.g. client implementation, server
     implementation, protocol itself, external layers).  This is a very
     difficult principle to follow in practice.

     Consequences of Violation: design errors, implementation bugs, poor
     deployment, poor maintainability, interoperability problems, poor
     usability, less peer review, protocol has to be "profiled" to
     interoperate.

     Case Study: X.400 vs. SMTP/MIME.  X.400 is very complex and is
     losing ground steadily in the marketplace.  SMTP/MIME is much
     simpler and is gaining ground in the marketplace.

2.   Make the Common Case Simple & Uncommon Case Possible

     This is largely a corollary of the KISS principle.  Sometimes
     phrased as "design for the common case."  The idea is to make the
     common case very simple without disallowing the useful uncommon
     cases.

     Consequences of Violation: Same as KISS.  If useful uncommon case
     is not possible, then a potentially complex protocol extension is
     necessary which results in more complexity than if the uncommon
     case was considered from the start.

     Case Study (common case too complex): ASN.1 makes the common case
     far too complex.  While it does provide for unlimited
     extensibility, in practice implementations can't deal with many
     legal structures due to the complexity.

     Case Study (uncommon case not possible): Internet Mail originally
     didn't allow non-text data.  MIME is more complex than it would
     have been if designed in from the beginning.

3.   0, 1, N Principle

     The "0, 1, N principle" is not an obvious principle but is true
     surprisingly often.  In general, any protocol element or object
     should come in quantities of 0, 1, or N where N is an arbitrary
     number.  If a limit is picked, it is likely to be too small.  This
     is especially true of hierarchy, and often true of names.

     Consequences of Violation: System has to be extended to allow



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     larger values.  This causes a transition with severe
     interoperability problems or a semantic overload of existing
     structure which adds complexity and confusion.

     Case Study: 640K

     Case Study: MIME media types.  Two levels of hierarchy were defined
     in the initial MIME specification.  This proved inadequate, so a
     new hierarchy delimiter had to be introduced to allow more naming
     hierarchy.

     Case Study: SMTP error codes have 3 levels of hierarchy with 10
     settings each.  This has proved to be insufficent and inflexible
     requiring the addition of ESMTP ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES.

     Exception: A quantity of two is permitted for clearly binary
     situations.

     Exception: Has to be balanced with the KISS principle.  For
     example, current practice limits most numbers in protocols to
     32-bit values.

4.   Be Liberal/Conservative

     The "Be Liberal in What You Accept, and Conservative in What You
     Generate" principle is well known in the IETF, but controversial in
     some cases.  The intention is to interoperability.  The basic idea
     is that on generation one should follow the standard strictly as
     that will work with all other compliant software.  On acceptance if
     one tolerates minor protocol or format violations, it helps work
     around known bugs in other software.  This principle would work
     great if everyone followed it.  However, when there are mixtures of
     systems which follow this rule and others which don't the
     exceptions below need to be considered.

     Consequences of Violation: decreased interoperability, customers
     blaming the violator of this principle for bugs in other vendor's
     software.

     Case Study: TBD

     Exception: Don't accept ambiguous interactive input with
     potentially vastly different meanings.  If the user ends up seeing
     the data in an indecipherable context, severe consequences result.
     It's often better to reject the data so the problem can be fixed at
     the source.

     Exception: Don't accept clearly illegal interactive input when



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     there are no known sources of it.  If client vendors notice their
     illegal behavior before deploying, it gets fixed before it's
     deployed, and overall interoperability is increased.

     Exception Case Study: When netnews was initially deployed, a number
     of clients generated date headers in a variety of illegal formats.
     Fairly early in the deployment, a major implementation was modified
     to discard news messages which had missing or improperly formatted
     date headers.  Very soon after this was deployed, all date headers
     in news were interoperable.

5.   Avoid Silly States

     Whenever possible, design the system so no silly states are
     possible.  A silly state is a combination of options or values
     which contradict each other or are nonsensical.

     Consequences of Violation: Increased complexity to deal with the
     possibility of the silly states occurring.

     Case Study: TBD

6.   Text Not Numbers

     Whenever possible, text should be used instead of numbers.  Numbers
     almost always have to be looked up in order for humans to interpret
     them.  Text can be read and debugged by a mere mortal.  One common
     counter argument is that numbers are more compact, but if size is a
     serious concern, a general purpose compression layer is usually a
     better solution.  Another counter argument is that the mapping
     tables and parsers to convert to internal numbers add complexity.
     In practice the complexity of debugging a non-text protocol is
     usually greater than the complexity of the parser and tables.

     Consequences of Violation: Protocol is difficult to debug, protocol
     is difficult to understand, examples are hard to provide.  Previous
     three consequences make this equivalent to a KISS violation.
     Results in poor user interface.  Endian problems.

     Case Study: X.400 problems are very hard to diagnose.  The protocol
     trace has to be recorded and run through an ASN.1 interpretor to
     debug.  SMTP can be debugged by observing the original protocol
     trace.

     Case Study: Whenever numeric error codes are used unqualified by
     text, humans are invariably presented with these error codes,
     resulting in a poor user interface and debugging difficulties.




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     Case Study: The telnet ENVIRON option had to be replaced with
     NEW-ENVIRON due to endian problems.

     Exceptions: Compression or Encrytion layers (which make things
     unreadable anyway).  Low-level protocols with high performance
     requirements.  Encapsulated non-text objects.

7.   Avoid Alternative Representations

     Having several ways to represent the same thing results in
     interoperability problems.  In general, implementors will only test
     the representation format they use.  The less often used
     representations will fail to work.  In a worst case scenario, two
     or more representions are widely used, but systems which use one
     often can't talk to systems which use another.

     Consequences of Violation: Serious interoperability problems, more
     bugs, conversion support necessary to interoperate.

     Case Study: The TIFF image format permits both a "big endian"
     version and a "little endian" version.  Some implementations can
     only read one or the other.  Many TIFF applications now have a
     "Macintosh format TIFF" vs "IBM format TIFF" option when saving
     TIFF files.

     Case Study: ASN.1 provides many ways of representing the same
     thing.  This has caused numerous interoperability problems as not
     all systems support all representations of a given field.  Profiles
     of ASN.1 are usually necessary to interoperate at all.

     Case Study: RFC 822 allows several different ways to quote the same
     address.  The useless ones like: "foo"."bar"@do.main rarely work.

     Exceptions: An alternative representation may be necessary for a
     more expressive case.  For example, quoted strings and literals in
     IMAP.  Rare alternative representations should be avoided.

8.   Announce Features, Not Version

     While version numbers are fine to inform the user of what
     implementation or conformance level they are at, they are usually a
     bad idea in protocols.  A system where the server announces
     available features and the client activates the features it wants
     results in a far better protocol.  If a protocol needs to be
     redesigned from scratch, use of a different port number for the new
     version will allow a parallel transition period -- otherwise when a
     major version number is increased on the server, the old clients
     cease to interoperate with it.



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     Consequences of Violation: Useless version number fields, painful
     version transition, complexity due to need to support older
     versions, meaning of version number sometimes ambiguous.

     Case Study: MIME has the MIME-Version header.  Since MIME also has
     feature announcement via headers, the version number is useless and
     will never change.

     Case Study: X.400:1988 fails to interoperate with X.400:1993 due to
     certain body part types.  [XXX: need to confirm]

9.   Avoid Unnecessary Layers

     Whenever two layered services can be combined into a single service
     without a significant increase in complexity, it should be done.
     Unnecessary layers result in implementor confusion and more
     complexity.

     Consequences of Violation: same as KISS violations

     Case Study: RFC 822 has a multi-layer parsing model which includes
     unfolding lines, lexing, removal of linear-white-space, and
     parsing.  This has resulted in endless confusion and serious
     interoperability problems.  The DRUMS WG is folding these into a
     single formal syntax and the result looks promising.

10.  Conclusions Based on Design Principles

     KISS: Every protocol should go through a "feature cut review"
     before going on the standards track.

     KISS/Text not Binary/Alternate Representations: Use of ASN.1 in new
     protocols should be strongly discouraged.

     0,1,N Principle/Text not Numbers: Use of 3 digit SMTP-style error
     codes in new protocols should be forbidden.

     Announce Features, Not Version: Server feature announcement should
     be required in most standards track protocols.

     Alternate Representations: CRLF line separators should be required.
     Big endian should be required in new binary protocols and formats.
     Use of UTF-8 should be preferred over labelled character sets in
     new protocols.







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11.  Security Considerations

     Many of these can have profound security implications.  Violation
     of KISS makes a security bug more likely.  Alternate
     Representations makes a security bug more likely in a less
     frequently used representation.  A silly state could introduce a
     security bug if special handling isn't included.  Failure to follow
     the 0,1,N principle when implementing makes buffer overrun problems
     more likely.

     While it's harder to fix a security bug in a binary protocol due to
     the debugging complexity, text protocols tend to be more
     susceptible to buffer overrun security problems.  These two factors
     probably offset each other.

12.  References


     [IMAP4] Crispin, M., "Internet Message Access Protocol - Version
     4rev1", RFC 2060, University of Washington, December 1996.

         <ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc2060.txt>

     [TBD]




13.  Author's Address

     Chris Newman
     Innosoft International, Inc.
     1050 Lakes Drive
     West Covina, CA 91790 USA

     Email: [e-mail]















Newman                                                          [Page 6]