TCPM WG                                                       A. Ramaiah
Internet-Draft                                                     Cisco
Intended status: Informational                            March 25, 2012
Expires: September 26, 2012


                       TCP option space extension
                   draft-ananth-tcpm-tcpoptext-00.txt

Abstract

   The document goals are as follows: Firstly, this document summarizes
   the motivations for extending TCP option space.  Secondly, It tries
   to summarize the various known issues that needs to be taken into
   account while extending the TCP option space.  Thirdly, it briefly
   provides a short summary of the various TCP option space proposals
   that has been proposed so far.  Some additional proposals which
   includes variations to the existing proposals are also presented.
   The goal of this document is to rejuvenate the discussions on this
   topic and eventually to converge on a scheme for extending TCP option
   space.

Status of this Memo

   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).  Note that other groups may also distribute
   working documents as Internet-Drafts.  The list of current Internet-
   Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

   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."

   This Internet-Draft will expire on September 26, 2012.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
   document authors.  All rights reserved.

   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



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   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.  Terminology  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   2.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
     2.1.  Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
   3.  Common issues with TCP option extension  . . . . . . . . . . .  5
   4.  TCP option space extension proposals . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
     4.1.  TCP LO and SLO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
     4.2.  TCP DO field overload (Extended segments)  . . . . . . . .  8
     4.3.  Increase (Double) TCP header size - TCPx2  . . . . . . . .  9
     4.4.  TCP LOIC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
     4.5.  Multiple segments with continuation  . . . . . . . . . . . 11
     4.6.  TCP option cookies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
     4.7.  Reuse/overload of other TCP fields . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
     4.8.  Miscellaneous  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
   5.  Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
   6.  IANA Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
   7.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
   8.  Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
   9.  References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
     9.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
     9.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
   Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20





















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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 [RFC2119]

   Middlebox : the middlebox could be a proxy like PEP (performance
   enhancing proxies), NAT device or a Firewall.  Note : The term packet
   and segment is used interchangeably in this document.










































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2.  Introduction

   TCP [RFC0793] as part of its header includes TCP options which
   provides some special functionality that can be negotiated by both
   ends of the TCP connection.  As the name implies, these aren't
   mandatory but must be supported by both ends in order to be active on
   a given TCP connection.  Some examples of deployed TCP options
   include TCP MSS, Window Scale, Selective ACK, Timestamps ([RFC1323]
   ).  Many other TCP options have been proposed and have been in use in
   different environments eg:- TCP-MD5 [RFC2385] is used to secure a BGP
   session.  The TCP option space limitation is imposed by the 4 bit
   Data Offset (DO) field which restricts the total length of the TCP
   header (including options) to 60 bytes ([RFC0793]).  Since the
   required fields of the TCP header consumes 20 bytes, this leaves 40
   bytes as the maximum amount of space for use by TCP options.

2.1.  Motivation

   The TCP option space of 40 bytes which was considered reasonable for
   the concurrent usage of some popular TCP options, is no longer able
   to cater to needs of recent growing demands.  Over the past few years
   several new TCP options like TCP-UTO ([RFC5482]), TCP-AO ([RFC5925]),
   experimental TCP options for acknowledgment congestion control
   ([RFC5690]), have been proposed.  MultiPath TCP
   ([I-D.ietf-mptcp-multiaddressed]) is another feature which calls for
   more TCP option space.  Lastly middleboxes doing WAN optimization
   functionality can also benefit with the increased TCP option space,
   although it is not the intention of this memo to address such
   requirements.  It is mentioned here simply for the sake of
   completeness.

   Since it is not easy to extend TCP option space, TCP option space
   hungry applications could move to a different protocol like SCTP
   ([RFC4960]), which for instance provides 255 chunks (each SCTP chunk
   is analogous to a TCP option) Needless to mention, this is not always
   possible and moving to a new protocol, at the least not only has all
   the issues that is exhibited by a new TCP option but even more (like
   general protocol upgrade and support, etc.,)

   It is therefore expedient to extend the TCP option space to meet the
   near term requirements coming from the various TCP applications for
   active internet deployment and research.









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3.  Common issues with TCP option extension

   Typically any proposal trying to extend the TCP option space needs to
   use some form of explicit signaling during the 3 way handshake of TCP
   to negotiate the usage of TCP extended options.  This is typically
   accomplished by means of having a new TCP option or by using one of
   the reserved bits of the TCP header.  In the reminder of the text we
   refer both of these methods simply as "TCP extended option(s)".  The
   following notes apply to either of these methods.

   Any TCP option extension proposals needs to be aware of the following
   design issues :-

   End host backward compatibility  - Any of the TCP option space
      extension proposals needs to satisfy the following end-host
      compatibility requirements :-

      H1)  Needs to have the capability to interoperate with stacks that
         do not have ability to negotiate the TCP extended option space.

      H2)  If the TCP extended options could not be negotiated, then it
         needs to fall back to normal mode of operation.

      H3)  It also needs to be noted that in some rare cases end-hosts
         not understanding a TCP option simply echoes back the TCP
         option in response.  This is due to buggy implementation and
         hence this is not a requirement at all.  Just mentioned for the
         sake of completeness.

   Middle box interoperability  - This is the toughest of the problems
      in getting towards a cleaner solution for extending TCP option
      space.  It needs to be noted that middlebox interactions disrupt
      the end-to-end flow characteristics and any solution is
      susceptible to it's presence.  TCP option space extension
      proposals need to be aware of the following issues :-

      M1)  Some middleboxes terminate TCP connections (Performance
         Enhancing Proxies) [RFC3135]

      M2)  Some middleboxes examine TCP payloads (Virus scanner,
         firewall), some modify the TCP payloads (NAT ALG)

      M3)  In general middleboxes keep state which includes TCP sequence
         numbers, some of them (proxies which do not terminate the TCP
         connection) would adjust the sequence and acknowledgement
         numbers on a per packet basis.





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      M4)  Some middleboxes strip unknown TCP options.

      M5)  Some middleboxes resegment TCP data.

      M6)  Some middleboxes drop packets containing unknown TCP options.

      Among the above M4, M5 and M6 are not common, M1, M2 & M3 exhibits
      varying degrees of commonality.  Cases M2 and to some extent M3
      proves to be the toughest candidate to work with for seamless TCP
      option extension.

   Another point worthy of mention would be that, the outgoing path or
   the return path may change between connections or even during a
   connection, which can lead to traversal of different middleboxes.
   This simply means that the same middlebox behavior cannot be
   guaranteed for all the packets of a given TCP connection.



































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4.  TCP option space extension proposals

   The following section summarizes some of the existing TCP option
   space proposals (section 4.1 to 4.4), touches upon some new ideas and
   variations of the existing proposals (section 4.5 to 4.7), and
   analyses each one of the proposal's strengths and weaknesses.  It
   needs to be emphasized that the new ideas (section 4.5 to 4.7) are by
   no means a complete solution, but some general ideas which can be
   used as building blocks or food for thought when trying to devise
   solution for the TCP option space exhaustion issue.

4.1.  TCP LO and SLO

   This ID ([I-D.eddy-tcp-loo]) talks about the defining a new TCP
   option that overrides the standard TCP DO field definition.  This is
   accomplished by means of a TCP Long Option (LO) which gets negotiated
   during SYN.  If both ends understand the LO option, then whenever the
   LO option is present, the DO field of the standard TCP header would
   be ignored for computing the TCP data offset.  Instead the "Header
   Length" specified in the LO option would be used to derive the Data
   Offset.  The LO option MUST be the first option present in the TCP
   segment.  The draft actually mandates the LO option to be present in
   all segments, to circumvent odd bugs arising due to TCP segments with
   different interpretations of DO with and without the presence of the
   LO option.

   The draft also defines a SYN Long Option (SLO).  The purpose of this
   option is to retain backward compatibility with hosts that do not
   support the LO option.  This is needed because a host which does not
   understand the LO option would mistakenly treat anything past the DO-
   specified boundary to be application data.  The SLO option is used in
   the case where 40 bytes (max option space in standard TCP) is not
   enough to carry the desired TCP options to be sent on the SYN.  It is
   only used by devices issuing an active open, since the passive open
   side can always use the LO option to send the long list of TCP
   options.  The left-off options are reliably delivered in the
   subsequent data (and acknowledgment ) segments.

   Discussion :

   This proposal addresses the host backward compatibility well (H1 &
   H2), since if the LO is not understood or stripped by a middlebox in
   between it would simply proceed with standard TCP semantics.  However
   there is no provision for handling H3.  This can be circumvented if
   needed, but it not probably worth the effort since such hosts are
   very uncommon in author's viewpoint.  In the reminder of the
   proposals H3's compatibility is not going to be discussed.




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   Coming to the middlebox case, if the middlebox strips the TCP option
   (M4), it is fine, since this option would not be negotiated.  If the
   SYN gets dropped by a middlebox (M6), then retransmission request may
   be tried without the long option.  For the case of PEP's (M1) if the
   connection gets terminated, then the middlebox which doesn't
   understand the LO option would reply with SYN+ACK without LO and it
   is fine since fallback to normal mode would happen.  But this
   proposal (like any other proposal) may have implications with
   resegmenting (M5) feature of some middleboxes (which do not
   understand the LO option) since the TCP options gets blindly copied
   in all segmented segments by the middlebox.  This would cause the
   end-host understanding the LO option to get confused, since it would
   interpret the duplicated segments as containing the TCP options.

   The issue of option data getting confused as payload due the
   middlebox segmenting the TCP data can be circumvented by either
   having the total length of the TCP segment OR the TCP sequence number
   which points to the beginning of the data (instead of the proposed
   header length field which points to the Data Offset).  It also needs
   to be noted that it is strongly advisable for any TCP options that
   could not fit into the standard TCP option space (40 bytes) begin
   after the 40 bytes boundary since any middlebox that cannot
   understand the LO option and does some TCP header fields sanity can
   get confused and drop the segment, if the new option is not fully
   contained in the TCP option space.

   This proposal would have an issue with middleboxes that do not
   understand the extension and tries operate on the TCP payload (M2).
   For M3, it really depends on the middlebox, if the middlebox sees the
   next sequence number as lesser than the one it expects, it would
   simply treat that as a duplicate (good thing), however for some
   middleboxes if it tries to cache segments and perform retransmissions
   etc., it may be a problematic.

4.2.  TCP DO field overload (Extended segments)

   This proposal ([I-D.kohler-tcpm-extopt]) tries to solve the TCP
   option space issue by redefining the TCP DO field.  Extended segments
   approach overloads the meaning of the standard TCP Data Offset field,
   keeping its original meaning for values of 5 and greater, but
   redefining it for values less than 5.  This is seen as acceptable
   since values less than 5 are currently impossible, illegal, and
   unusable.  Extended segments avoid the need for new options by
   changing the way that the existing standard header is parsed.

   The granularity of option lengths that extended segments can support
   is limited to the number of unusable Data Offset values (5, 0 through
   4).  Currently, the extended segments proposal defines 4 fixed



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   lengths, and one "infinite" length that means the entire segment is
   options, with no application data.  The fixed option lengths are 48,
   64, 128, and 256 bytes.

   Discussion :

   If the required per-data-segment TCP options space for some extension
   or combination of extensions does not map to exactly one of the
   extended DO values, then padding bytes are required.  If 129 bytes of
   options are required on a data segment, then a length of 256 must be
   used, and 127 bytes of useless padding are added.

   As far as the end host compatibilty goes, if the end host doesn't
   understand the extended SYN (i.e. a SYN with DO < 5), the SYN would
   get dropped which is the typical behavior.  Instead if some
   implementations who chose to send RST due to malformed segment (TCP
   header validation failure) is problematic since the end host would
   get confused whether the RST is due to its original intention (i.e.
   listener not present on the server or some other known thing like
   policy restrictions).  The draft also mentions that extended SYN-ACKs
   may be sent in response to non-extended SYNs.  This complicates the
   recovery procedure even more, if not understood, and goes against the
   way that all current negotiable TCP extensions operate (only used on
   SYN-ACK if advertised on SYN).  Hence we can see that the fallback
   (cases H1 and H2) is not smooth when compared to the LO proposal.

   As the middlebox goes, it suffers the same set of issues as the LO
   proposal.  But there is no provision that can be made for the case of
   re-segmentation by middleboxes (M5).  So, extended segments approach
   seems to be inferior compared to LO proposal in terms of robustness.

4.3.  Increase (Double) TCP header size - TCPx2

   This proposal([I-D.allman-tcpx2-hack]) was aimed to not just address
   the TCP option space exhaustion but to address other myriad of issues
   surrounding the TCP header fields. (like window size, reserved bits
   etc.,) TCPx2 requires a new IP protocol number.  It defines a new TCP
   header which has all the original field sizes doubled.  Hence the TCP
   DO field becomes 8 bits instead of the original 4 bits.

   Discussion :

   Ideally this proposal seems to be the best long term solution for TCP
   issues caused due the limits imposed by the various fields of TCP
   header, which includes the TCP option space issue.  However, for
   short, medium or immediate term deployment it is not practical.
   TCPx2 would face the same resistance (even worse since it is a new
   entrant) from middleboxes as experienced by some "newer" protocols



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   like SCTP etc., which hampered their successful adoption and
   deployment.  End hosts TCP/IP stacks need to change to support the
   new IP protocol number, demux logic and new TCP header.  The standard
   algorithms like TCP checksum, TCP MAC computation etc., needs to
   change, especially makes it difficult in cases where this
   functionality is assisted by hardware.  The sockets API or TCP API's
   would have to change to accommodate the TCP header changes (src and
   dest ports) and also to offer backward compatibility to existing TCP.
   All the diagnostic tools surrounding etc., needs to change, the list
   only continues.

4.4.  TCP LOIC

   The crux of this proposal ([I-D.yourtchenko-tcp-loic]) is to quickly
   negotiate the LO (referred as LOIC in the document) option by sending
   it in SYN segment and also fallback to normal mode if the remote end
   or the middlebox drops the SYN.  This is accomplished by sending 2
   SYN's, one with the intent of negotiating the LO option and other one
   which contains the all the options that needs to be negotiated
   (includes the ones that cannot fit in the standard option space).  To
   prevent the TCP option space mistakenly read as data, the proposal
   deliberately increments the checksum by 2 in the second SYN segment
   (which contains the TCP options).  If the end host (or middlebox)
   doesn't understand the signalling (checksum + 2), it would drop the
   segment and the first SYN would get replied with SYN+ACK without LO.
   OTOH, if the stack understands the method, it would be able to
   process the both the SYNs (all the TCP options) and reply back with
   LO.

   Discussion

   This proposal cleverly avoids doing the option exchange dance after
   the SYN segment gets ACKnowledged like seen in LO proposal (section
   4.1) by sending duplicate SYN's.  This proposal addresses the host
   backward compatibility well (H1 & H2).  However it has some issues.
   The overloading of checksum can have other implications esp., with
   some middeboxes that modify the checksum (NAT) which can rollover the
   16 bit field and the checksum decrement would fail to work.
   Overloading checksum would not bode well with diagnostic tools
   (sniffers etc.,) and also in cases where checksum gets offloaded to
   some hardware which needs to understand this method.

   M1, M4, M6 are taken care of well by this proposal.  It suffers the
   same fate as other proposals as far as M5 is concerned.  It exhibits
   the same behavior as far as M2 and M3 goes, since the proposal sends
   TCP options as part of the standard TCP header.

   One other note worthy of mentioning would be, this proposal is in



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   some sense similar to the concept of "extended segments".  Extended
   segments approach tries to overload (use the illegal unused values)
   the DO field.  One could argue that instead of mucking around with
   the checksum you could actually send the second SYN with "incorrect"
   ( DO < 5) value.  However if we throw in the middlebox into the
   equation, the likelihood of a packet getting dropped by the middlebox
   (firewall which does some TCP header validation) with DO field
   incorrectly specified is more when compared to packet with incorrect
   checksum.  (This is because typically firewalls don't try to do
   compute intensive operations like TCP checksum validation)

4.5.  Multiple segments with continuation

   Both, extended segments and LOIC (section 4.2 and section 4.4)
   already mentions about sending multiple SYNs.  This idea also uses
   the same approach with a key difference, i.e. send multiple SYNs with
   a "TCP continuation option".  The TCP continuation option's purpose
   (which is a simple option-kind option) is to convey to the other end
   that "not all TCP options could be fit into to the current TCP
   segment's standard option space (40 bytes) and subsequent segments
   would convey the reminder of the option".  For example lets us say we
   have 100 bytes of TCP option, this would require 3 segments to
   convey, the first 2 of which would have the TCP continuation option
   set.  The rationale for this kind of thinking is twofold.  Firstly,
   keeping in mind short term goals, TCP option space requirement isn't
   very large, hence a few segments should do the task at hand.
   Secondly, middleboxes (and end hosts) gets confused if you send
   something in the data portion, hence don't take chance of putting
   anything in the data portion of TCP.

   The obvious drawback of this scheme is that if there a way too many
   TCP options to be conveyed, then it would take more segments to
   convey all of them.  For SYN segments, send multiple SYNs, for Data
   segments (during the middle of connection) try to send multiple data
   segments (behave as though nagle is turned off) and piggyback TCP
   options with TCP continuation.  Well, this may sound outrageous but
   it should at least get rid of the middlebox issue at the cost of
   adding more processing and delay.  Pick the devil.

   Sending duplicate segments is generally ok and should not have
   adverse middlebox effects.  Sending old segments (ones that are
   already ACKed is another school of thought.  This is how keepalives
   work where the sequence number is set to TCB.SNDUNA - 1, which
   solicits a corrective ACK from the other end.  Sending old data
   segment, simply gets dropped and one could use that to convey TCP
   options, but that may get clumsier since you really need TCP options
   to be inline with the current data.  Just mentioned here for the sake
   of completeness.



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4.6.  TCP option cookies

   This is yet another interesting thought (at least in author's
   opinion).  The idea is to pack TCP options in a similar way TCP SYN
   cookies did. i.e., instead of doing the "Option-Kind" OR "option-
   kind-value", we could just have bit masks OR some encoding scheme
   defined under a TCP option template.  We can call it as a "TCP
   template or TCP Master option".  At least during the initial
   negotiation this would be helpful to scavenge TCP option space.  The
   details of this need to be thought of and extensibility also needs to
   be addressed.  Compressing TCP options is another school of thought
   along the similar lines, but the compression overhead needs space as
   well, hence needs to be carefully thought about.

4.7.  Reuse/overload of other TCP fields

   Some of the schemes already tried to overload some TCP fields like
   TCP DO (section 4.2) and TCP checksum overload (section 4.4).
   Another tempting field to overload is the TCP urgent pointer.  It
   needs to be noted that the TCP urgent pointer is valid only when the
   URG bit is set.  Also the TCP urgent pointer is used only by some
   legacy applications like Telnet and rlogin, both of which don't use
   any advanced TCP options nor require such a functionality.  Also
   ([RFC6093]), suggests deprecating its usage for newer applications.
   It mentions that due to inconsistent interpretation of the urgent
   pointer by end hosts and some middleboxes which clear the urgent flag
   and urgent pointer, the urgent mechanism should be deprecated.  But,
   in authors opinion, the middleboxes that clear the urgent pointer
   only for some given ports like telnet and FTP.  Given all these
   facts, it is not unreasonable to try to put this field to some good
   use.  The urgent pointer could be used to redefine the TCP DO field
   in the same way the TCP DO redefinition scheme did but with a 16 bits
   of precision as opposed to just 3 (values < 5).  The hope is that
   middleboxes (firewalls) would simply ignore the urgent pointer value
   since the URG bit is not set.  We could also use the Urgent pointer
   for a fallback mechanism like the TCP checksum (LOIC) proposal did.

4.8.  Miscellaneous

   The previous sections have been trying to do a best possible effort
   in identifying some candidates for scavenging TCP option space, some
   ways of getting around the middleboxes etc., One school of thought
   would be, it is sometimes ok to convey TCP options across multiple
   segments (the TCP continuation option touched upon this aspect). for
   example let's say there are 5 SACK blocks, they can't be conveyed
   using a single TCP segment, this takes multiple TCP segments which is
   ok (the way it is working today).  It may be possible to do this for
   other TCP options as well, which need not be conveyed on every packet



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   like the TCP security option.  For e.g., TCP timestamps need to be
   conveyed on every segment, but care needs to be taken not to break
   PAWS etc.,
















































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5.  Conclusion

   If we get this far in the document, the obvious question would be "is
   there a winner?" clearly not since any method has some issue or the
   other and most of them are vulnerable to the middlebox processing of
   packets (in particular cases M2 and M3 are tough to circumvent with).
   But, there are different types of middleboxes and it really needs to
   be seen what percentage of them exists in different environments.
   There was a recent interesting study [IMC2011], which focused on the
   issues of extending TCP which includes the analysis of various
   middlebox behaviors.  This could be used as a reference point for any
   new proposals on extending TCP which includes the TCP option space
   extension proposals.

   This document listed a plethora of solutions (some of which may be
   half-baked) to address some common middlebox problems and graceful
   fallback to regular TCP methods.  Now, no solution is a perfect
   solution and it is impossible to work around all the use cases
   imposed by middleboxes.  Moving to a new protocol also is not a
   solution, hence we are left with no choice but to extend TCP that
   works for most of the use cases.  Lastly, but not the least, the hope
   of this document is that it serves as a foundational document that
   touches upon the various aspects of extending TCP option space and
   acts as a motivational document to converge to a possible solution
   for the TCP option space exhaustion issue.


























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6.  IANA Considerations

   None.
















































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7.  Security Considerations

   None at this time.
















































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8.  Acknowledgements

   Thanks to Dan Wing and Andrew Yourtchenko for the initial review of
   the draft.















































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9.  References

9.1.  Normative References

   [RFC0793]  Postel, J., "Transmission Control Protocol", STD 7,
              RFC 793, September 1981.

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

9.2.  Informative References

   [I-D.allman-tcpx2-hack]
              Allman, M., "TCPx2: Don't Fence Me In",
              draft-allman-tcpx2-hack-00 (work in progress), May 2006.

   [I-D.eddy-tcp-loo]
              Eddy, W. and A. Langley, "Extending the Space Available
              for TCP Options", draft-eddy-tcp-loo-04 (work in
              progress), July 2008.

   [I-D.ietf-mptcp-multiaddressed]
              Ford, A., Raiciu, C., Handley, M., and O. Bonaventure,
              "TCP Extensions for Multipath Operation with Multiple
              Addresses", draft-ietf-mptcp-multiaddressed-07 (work in
              progress), March 2012.

   [I-D.kohler-tcpm-extopt]
              Kohler, E., "Extended Option Space for TCP",
              draft-kohler-tcpm-extopt-00 (work in progress),
              September 2004.

   [I-D.yourtchenko-tcp-loic]
              Yourtchenko, A., "Introducing TCP Long Options by Invalid
              Checksum", draft-yourtchenko-tcp-loic-00 (work in
              progress), April 2011.

   [IMC2011]  Honda et. al, M., "Internet Measurement conference 2011.
              http://conferences.sigcomm.org/imc/2011/docs/p181.pdf",
              November 2011.

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

   [RFC2385]  Heffernan, A., "Protection of BGP Sessions via the TCP MD5
              Signature Option", RFC 2385, August 1998.

   [RFC2616]  Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H.,



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Internet-Draft              TCP option space                  March 2012


              Masinter, L., Leach, P., and T. Berners-Lee, "Hypertext
              Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1", RFC 2616, June 1999.

   [RFC3135]  Border, J., Kojo, M., Griner, J., Montenegro, G., and Z.
              Shelby, "Performance Enhancing Proxies Intended to
              Mitigate Link-Related Degradations", RFC 3135, June 2001.

   [RFC4960]  Stewart, R., "Stream Control Transmission Protocol",
              RFC 4960, September 2007.

   [RFC5482]  Eggert, L. and F. Gont, "TCP User Timeout Option",
              RFC 5482, March 2009.

   [RFC5690]  Floyd, S., Arcia, A., Ros, D., and J. Iyengar, "Adding
              Acknowledgement Congestion Control to TCP", RFC 5690,
              February 2010.

   [RFC5925]  Touch, J., Mankin, A., and R. Bonica, "The TCP
              Authentication Option", RFC 5925, June 2010.

   [RFC6093]  Gont, F. and A. Yourtchenko, "On the Implementation of the
              TCP Urgent Mechanism", RFC 6093, January 2011.





























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Author's Address

   Anantha Ramaiah
   Cisco
   170 Tasman Drive
   San Jose, CA  95134
   USA

   Phone: +1 (408) 525-6486
   Email: ananth@cisco.com









































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