On 03/12/2015 11:52 PM, Eygene Ryabinkin wrote:
Jon Postel. I'm told that it is out of favor these days in protocol-land, from a security standpoint if nothing else. The principle has nothing to do with security: it doesn't mean "accept all junk that comes in". It is about interoperability of different implementation and means "use the smallest possible subset of the
Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 05:31:54PM -0700, Michael Thomas wrote: protocol when you're sending, but be prepared to accept any subset of protocol messages when you're receiving". Eric Allman's ACM paper, http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/8/114933-the-robustness-principle-reconsi... is a good reading for this, I believe.
The original principle had little thought toward security, and i was there for the row for which Eric's paper was almost certainly inspired by (started it, actually). In the early days, a lot of people to took it as trying very hard to make sense of the broken -- far beyond rfc 2119's musts and shoulds. A lot of people regret that now for a lot of reasons, including security. I still have mixed emotions about abandoning it. Mike