Network Working Group                                            F. Gont
Request for Comments: 5461                                       UTN/FRH
Category: Informational                                    February 2009


                    TCP's Reaction to Soft Errors

Status of This Memo

  This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
  not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
  memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

  Copyright (c) 2009 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 carefully, as they describe your rights
  and restrictions with respect to this document.

Abstract

  This document describes a non-standard, but widely implemented,
  modification to TCP's handling of ICMP soft error messages that
  rejects pending connection-requests when those error messages are
  received.  This behavior reduces the likelihood of long delays
  between connection-establishment attempts that may arise in a number
  of scenarios, including one in which dual-stack nodes that have IPv6
  enabled by default are deployed in IPv4 or mixed IPv4 and IPv6
  environments.

















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Table of Contents

  1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
  2.  Error Handling in TCP  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
    2.1.  Reaction to ICMP Error Messages That Indicate Hard
          Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
    2.2.  Reaction to ICMP Error Messages That Indicate Soft
          Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
  3.  Problems That May Arise from TCP's Reaction to Soft Errors . .  5
    3.1.  General Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5
    3.2.  Problems That May Arise with Dual-Stack IPv6 on by
          Default  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6
  4.  Deployed Workarounds for Long Delays between
      Connection-Establishment Attempts  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  7
    4.1.  Context-Sensitive ICMP/TCP Interaction . . . . . . . . . .  7
    4.2.  Context-Sensitive ICMP/TCP Interaction with Repeated
          Confirmation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  8
  5.  Possible Drawbacks of Changing ICMP Semantics  . . . . . . . .  9
    5.1.  Non-Deterministic Transient Network Failures . . . . . . .  9
    5.2.  Deterministic Transient Network Failures . . . . . . . . . 10
    5.3.  Non-Compliant Network Address Translators (NATs) . . . . . 10
  6.  Security Considerations  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
  7.  Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
  8.  Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
  9.  References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
    9.1.  Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
    9.2.  Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
























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1.  Introduction

  The handling of network failures can be separated into two different
  actions: fault isolation and fault recovery.  Fault isolation
  consists of the actions that hosts and routers take to determine that
  there is a network failure.  Fault recovery, on the other hand,
  consists of the actions that hosts and routers perform in an attempt
  to survive a network failure [RFC0816].

  In the Internet architecture, the Internet Control Message Protocol
  (ICMP) [RFC0792] is one fault isolation technique to report network
  error conditions to the hosts sending datagrams over the network.

  When a host is notified of a network error, its network stack will
  attempt to continue communications, if possible, in the presence of
  the network failure.  The fault recovery strategy may depend on the
  type of network failure taking place and the time at which the error
  condition is detected.

  This document analyzes the problems that may arise due to TCP's fault
  recovery reactions to ICMP soft errors.  It analyzes the problems
  that may arise when a host tries to establish a TCP connection with a
  multihomed host that has some unreachable addresses.  Additionally,
  it analyzes the problems that may arise in the specific scenario
  where dual-stack nodes that have IPv6 enabled by default are deployed
  in IPv4 or mixed IPv4 and IPv6 environments.

  Finally, we document a modification to TCP's reaction to ICMP
  messages indicating soft errors during connection startup that has
  been implemented in a variety of TCP/IP stacks to help overcome the
  problems outlined below.  We stress that this modification runs
  contrary to the standard behavior and this document unambiguously
  does not change the standard reaction.

  [Gont] describes alternative approaches for dealing with the problem
  of long delays between connection-establishment attempts in TCP.

  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].

2.  Error Handling in TCP

  Network errors can be divided into soft and hard errors.  Soft errors
  are considered to be transient network failures that are likely to be
  solved in the near term.  Hard errors, on the other hand, are
  considered to reflect network error conditions that are unlikely to
  be solved in the near future.



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  The Host Requirements RFC [RFC1122] states, in Section 4.2.3.9, that
  the ICMP messages that indicate soft errors are ICMP "Destination
  Unreachable" codes 0 (network unreachable), 1 (host unreachable), and
  5 (source route failed); ICMP "Time Exceeded" codes 0 (time to live
  exceeded in transit) and 1 (fragment reassembly time exceeded); and
  ICMP "Parameter Problem".  Even though ICMPv6 did not exist when
  [RFC1122] was written, one could extrapolate the concept of soft
  errors to ICMPv6 "Destination Unreachable" codes 0 (no route to
  destination) and 3 (address unreachable); ICMPv6 "Time Exceeded"
  codes 0 (hop limit exceeded in transit) and 1 (fragment reassembly
  time exceeded); and ICMPv6 "Parameter Problem" codes 0 (erroneous
  header field encountered), 1 (unrecognized Next Header type
  encountered), and 2 (unrecognized IPv6 option encountered) [RFC4443].

  +----------------------------------+--------------------------------+
  |               ICMP               |             ICMPv6             |
  +----------------------------------+--------------------------------+
  |  Destination Unreachable (codes  | Destination Unreachable (codes |
  |           0, 1, and 5)           |            0 and 3)            |
  +----------------------------------+--------------------------------+
  |   Time Exceeded (codes 0 and 1)  |  Time Exceeded (codes 0 and 1) |
  +----------------------------------+--------------------------------+
  |         Parameter Problem        | Parameter Problem (codes 0, 1, |
  |                                  |             and 2)             |
  +----------------------------------+--------------------------------+

       Table 1: Extrapolating the concept of soft errors to ICMPv6

  When there is a network failure that is not signaled to the sending
  host, such as a gateway corrupting packets, TCP's fault recovery
  action is to repeatedly retransmit the corresponding data until
  either they get acknowledged or the connection times out.

  In the case that a host does receive an ICMP error message referring
  to an ongoing TCP connection, the IP layer will pass this message up
  to the corresponding TCP instance to raise awareness of the network
  failure [RFC1122].  TCP's reaction to ICMP messages will depend on
  the type of error being signaled.

2.1.  Reaction to ICMP Error Messages That Indicate Hard Errors

  When receiving an ICMP error message that indicates a hard error
  condition, compliant TCP implementations will simply abort the
  corresponding connection, regardless of the connection state.

  The Host Requirements RFC [RFC1122] states, in Section 4.2.3.9, that
  TCP SHOULD abort connections when receiving ICMP error messages that
  indicate hard errors.  This policy is based on the premise that, as



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  hard errors indicate network error conditions that will not change in
  the near term, it will not be possible for TCP to usefully recover
  from this type of network failure.

  It should be noted that virtually none of the current TCP
  implementations follow the advice in [RFC1122], and they do not abort
  the corresponding connection when an ICMP hard error is received for
  a connection that is in any of the synchronized states
  [ICMP-ATTACKS].

2.2.  Reaction to ICMP Error Messages That Indicate Soft Errors

  If an ICMP error message is received that indicates a soft error, TCP
  will repeatedly retransmit the corresponding data until either they
  get acknowledged or the connection times out.  In addition, the TCP
  sender may record the information for possible later use (see
  [Stevens], pp. 317-319).

  The Host Requirements RFC [RFC1122] states, in Section 4.2.3.9, that
  TCP MUST NOT abort connections when receiving ICMP error messages
  that indicate soft errors.  This policy is based on the premise that,
  as soft errors are transient network failures that will hopefully be
  solved in the near term, one of the retransmissions will succeed.

  When the connection timer expires and an ICMP soft error message has
  been received before the timeout, TCP can use this information to
  provide the user with a more specific error message (see [Stevens],
  pp. 317-319).

  This reaction to soft errors exploits a valuable feature of the
  Internet -- that, for many network failures, the network can be
  dynamically reconstructed without any disruption of the endpoints.

3.  Problems That May Arise from TCP's Reaction to Soft Errors

3.1.  General Discussion

  Even though TCP's fault recovery strategy in the presence of soft
  errors allows for TCP connections to survive transient network
  failures, there are scenarios in which this policy may cause
  undesirable effects.

  For example, consider a scenario in which an application on a local
  host is trying to communicate with a destination whose name resolves
  to several IP addresses.  The application on the local host will try
  to establish a connection with the destination host, usually cycling
  through the list of IP addresses until one succeeds [RFC1123].
  Suppose that some (but not all) of the addresses in the returned list



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  are permanently unreachable.  If such a permanently unreachable
  address is the first in the list, the application will likely try to
  use it first and block waiting for a timeout before trying an
  alternate address.

  As discussed in Section 2, this unreachability condition may or may
  not be signaled to the sending host.  If the local TCP is not
  signaled concerning the error condition, there is very little that
  can be done other than to repeatedly retransmit the SYN segment and
  wait for the existing timeout mechanism in TCP, or an application
  timeout, to be triggered.  However, even if unreachability is
  signaled by some intermediate router to the local TCP by means of an
  ICMP soft error message, the local TCP will still repeatedly
  retransmit the SYN segment until the connection timer expires (in the
  hopes that the error is transient).  The Host Requirements RFC
  [RFC1122] states that this timer MUST be large enough to provide
  retransmission of the SYN segment for at least 3 minutes.  This would
  mean that the application on the local host would spend several
  minutes for each unreachable address with which it tries to establish
  the TCP connection.  These long delays between connection-
  establishment attempts would be inappropriate for many interactive
  applications, such as the Web. [Shneiderman] and [Thadani] offer some
  insight into interactive systems (e.g., how the response time affects
  the usability of an application).  This highlights that there is no
  one definition of a "transient error" and that the level of
  persistence in the face of failure represents a tradeoff.

  It is worth noting that while most applications try the addresses
  returned by the name-to-address function in serial, this is certainly
  not the only possible approach.  For example, applications could try
  multiple addresses in parallel until one succeeds, possibly avoiding
  the problem of long delays between connection-establishment attempts
  described in this document [Gont].

3.2.  Problems That May Arise with Dual-Stack IPv6 on by Default

  A particular scenario in which the above type of problem may occur
  regularly is that where dual-stack nodes that have IPv6 enabled by
  default are deployed in IPv4 or mixed IPv4 and IPv6 environments and
  the IPv6 connectivity is non-existent [RFC4943].

  As discussed in [RFC4943], there are two possible variants of this
  scenario, which differ in whether or not the lack of connectivity is
  signaled to the sending node.







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  In those scenarios in which packets sent to a destination are
  silently dropped and no ICMPv6 [RFC4443] errors are generated, there
  is little that can be done other than to wait for the existing
  connection-timeout mechanism in TCP, or an application timeout, to be
  triggered.

  In scenarios where a legacy node has no default routers and Neighbor
  Unreachability Detection (NUD) [RFC4861] fails for destinations
  assumed to be on-link, or where firewalls or other systems that
  enforce scope boundaries send ICMPv6 errors, the sending node will be
  signaled of the unreachability problem.  However, as discussed in
  Section 2.2, compliant TCP implementations will not abort connections
  when receiving ICMP error messages that indicate soft errors.

4.  Deployed Workarounds for Long Delays between Connection-
   Establishment Attempts

  The following subsections describe a number of workarounds for the
  problem of long delays between connection-establishment attempts that
  have been implemented in a variety of TCP/IP stacks.  We note that
  treating soft errors as hard errors during connection establishment,
  while widespread, is not part of standard TCP behavior and this
  document does not change that state of affairs.  The consensus of the
  TCPM WG (TCP Maintenance and Minor Extensions Working Group) was to
  document this widespread implementation of nonstandard TCP behavior
  but to not change the TCP standard.

4.1.  Context-Sensitive ICMP/TCP Interaction

  As discussed in Section 1, it may make sense for the fault recovery
  action to depend not only on the type of error being reported but
  also on the state of the connection against which the error is
  reported.  For example, one could infer that when an error arrives in
  response to opening a new connection, it is probably caused by
  opening the connection improperly, rather than by a transient network
  failure [RFC0816].

  A number of TCP implementations have modified their reaction to all
  ICMP soft errors and treat them as hard errors when they are received
  for connections in the SYN-SENT or SYN-RECEIVED states.  For example,
  this workaround has been implemented in the Linux kernel since
  version 2.0.0 (released in 1996) [Linux].  However, it should be
  noted that this change violates section 4.2.3.9 of [RFC1122], which
  states that these ICMP error messages indicate soft error conditions
  and that, therefore, TCP MUST NOT abort the corresponding connection.






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  [RFC3168] states that a host that receives a RST in response to the
  transmission of an ECN (Explicit Congestion Notification)-setup SYN
  packet MAY resend a SYN with the CWR (Congestion Window Reduced) and
  ECE (ECN-Echo) bits cleared.  This is meant to deal with faulty
  middle-boxes that reject connections when a SYN segment has the ECE
  and CWR bits set.  Some faulty middle-boxes (e.g., firewalls) may
  reject these connection requests with an ICMP soft error of type 3
  (Destination Unreachable), code 0 (net unreachable) or 1 (host
  unreachable), instead of a RST.  Therefore, a system that processes
  ICMP soft error messages as hard errors when they are received for a
  connection in any of the non-synchronized states could resend the SYN
  segment with the ECE and CWR bits cleared when an ICMP "net
  unreachable" (type 3, code 0) or "host unreachable" (type 3, code 1)
  error message is received in response to a SYN segment that had these
  bits set.

  Section 4.2 discusses a more conservative approach than that sketched
  above, which is implemented in FreeBSD.

4.2.  Context-Sensitive ICMP/TCP Interaction with Repeated Confirmation

  A more conservative approach than simply treating soft errors as hard
  errors (as described above) would be to abort a connection in the
  SYN-SENT or SYN-RECEIVED states only after an ICMP soft error has
  been received a specified number of times and the SYN segment has
  been retransmitted more than some specified number of times.

  Two new parameters would have to be introduced to TCP, to be used
  only during the connection-establishment phase: MAXSYNREXMIT and
  MAXSOFTERROR.  MAXSYNREXMIT would specify the number of times the SYN
  segment would have to be retransmitted before a connection is
  aborted.  MAXSOFTERROR would specify the number of ICMP messages
  indicating soft errors that would have to be received before a
  connection is aborted.

  Two additional state variables would need to be introduced to store
  additional state information during the connection-establishment
  phase: "nsynrexmit" and "nsofterror".  Both would be initialized to
  zero when a connection attempt is initiated, with "nsynrexmit" being
  incremented by one every time the SYN segment is retransmitted and
  "nsofterror" being incremented by one every time an ICMP message that
  indicates a soft error is received.

  A connection in the SYN-SENT or SYN-RECEIVED states would be aborted
  if "nsynrexmit" was greater than MAXSYNREXMIT and "nsofterror" was
  simultaneously greater than MAXSOFTERROR.





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  This approach would give the network more time to solve the
  connectivity problem than does simply aborting a connection attempt
  upon reception of the first soft error.  However, it should be noted
  that, depending on the values chosen for the MAXSYNREXMIT and
  MAXSOFTERROR parameters, this approach could still lead to long
  delays between connection-establishment attempts, thus not solving
  the problem.  For example, BSD systems abort connections in the SYN-
  SENT or the SYN-RECEIVED state when a second ICMP error is received
  and the SYN segment has been retransmitted more than three times.
  They also set up a "connection-establishment timer" that imposes an
  upper limit on the time the connection-establishment attempt has to
  succeed, which expires after 75 seconds (see [Stevens2], pp. 828-
  829).  Even when this policy may be better than the three-minute
  timeout policy specified in [RFC1122], it may still be inappropriate
  for handling the potential problems described in this document.  This
  more conservative approach has been implemented in BSD systems for
  more than ten years [Stevens2].

  We also note that the approach given in this section is a generalized
  version of the approach sketched in the previous section.  In
  particular, with MAXSOFTERROR set to 1 and MAXSYNREXMIT set to zero,
  the schemes are identical.

5.  Possible Drawbacks of Changing ICMP Semantics

  The following subsections discuss some possible drawbacks that could
  arise from use of the non-standard modifications to TCP's reaction to
  soft errors, which are described in Section 4.1 and Section 4.2.

5.1.  Non-Deterministic Transient Network Failures

  In scenarios where a transient network failure affects all of the
  addresses returned by the name-to-address translation function, all
  destinations could be unreachable for some short period of time.  For
  example, a mobile system consisting of a cell and a repeater may pass
  through a tunnel, leading to a loss of connectivity at the repeater,
  with the repeater sending ICMP soft errors back to the cell.  Also, a
  transient routing problem might lead some intervening router to drop
  a SYN segment that was meaning to establish a TCP connection and send
  an ICMP soft error back to the host.  Finally, a SYN segment carrying
  data might get fragmented and some of the resulting fragments might
  get lost, with the destination host timing out the reassembly process
  and sending an ICMP soft error back to the sending host (although
  this particular scenario is unlikely because, while [RFC0793] allows
  SYN segments to carry data, in practice they do not).  In such
  scenarios, the application could quickly cycle through all the IP
  addresses in the list and return an error, when it could have let TCP




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  retry a destination a few seconds later, when the transient problem
  could have disappeared.  In this case, the modifications described
  here make TCP less robust than a standards-compliant implementation.

  Additionally, in many cases a domain name maps to a single IP
  address.  In such a case, it might be better to try that address
  persistently according to normal TCP rules, instead of just aborting
  the pending connection upon receipt of an ICMP soft error.

5.2.  Deterministic Transient Network Failures

  There are some scenarios in which transient network failures could be
  deterministic.  For example, consider a scenario in which upstream
  network connectivity is triggered by network use.  That is, network
  connectivity is instantiated only on an "as needed" basis.  In this
  scenario, the connection triggering the upstream connectivity could
  deterministically receive ICMP Destination Unreachables while the
  upstream connectivity is being activated, and thus would be aborted.
  Again, in this case, the modifications described here make TCP less
  robust than a standards-compliant implementation.

5.3.  Non-Compliant Network Address Translators (NATs)

  Some NATs respond to an unsolicited inbound SYN segment with an ICMP
  soft error message.  If the system sending the unsolicited SYN
  segment implements the workaround described in this document, it will
  abort the connection upon receipt of the ICMP error message, thus
  probably preventing TCP's simultaneous open from succeeding through
  the NAT.  However, it must be stressed that those NATs described in
  this section are not BEHAVE-compliant and therefore should implement
  REQ-4 of [RFC5382] instead.

  In those scenarios in which such a non-BEHAVE-compliant NAT is
  deployed, TCP simultaneous opens could fail.  While undesirable, this
  is tolerable in many situations.  For instance, a number of host
  implementations of TCP do not support TCP simultaneous opens
  [Zuquete].

6.  Security Considerations

  This document describes a non-standard modification to TCP's reaction
  to soft errors that has been implemented in a variety of TCP
  implementations.  This modification makes TCP abort a connection in
  the SYN-SENT or the SYN-RECEIVED states when it receives an ICMP
  error message that indicates a soft error.  Therefore, the
  modification could be exploited to reset valid connections during the
  connection-establishment phase.




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  The non-standard workaround described in this document makes TCP more
  vulnerable to attack, even if only slightly.  However, we note that
  an attacker wishing to reset ongoing TCP connections could send any
  of the ICMP hard error messages in any connection state.

  Generally, TCP backs off its retransmission timer each time it
  retransmits the SYN segment for the same connection.  If a TCP
  implements the modification described in this document, that is,
  tries the next address in the list upon receipt of an ICMP error
  message, it might end up injecting more packets into the network than
  if it had simply retried the same address a number of times.
  However, compliant TCP implementations might already incur this
  behavior (e.g., as a result of cycling through the list of IP
  addresses in response to RST segments) as there are currently no
  recommendations on methods for limiting the rate at which SYN
  segments are sent for connecting to a specific destination.

  A discussion of the use of ICMP to perform a variety of attacks
  against TCP, and a number of counter-measures that minimize the
  impact of these attacks, can be found in [ICMP-ATTACKS].

  A discussion of the security issues arising from the use of ICMPv6
  can be found in [RFC4443].

7.  Acknowledgements

  The author wishes to thank Mark Allman, Jari Arkko, David Black, Ron
  Bonica, Ted Faber, Gorry Fairhurst, Sally Floyd, Juan Fraschini,
  Tomohiro Fujisaki, Guillermo Gont, Saikat Guha, Alfred Hoenes,
  Michael Kerrisk, Eddie Kohler, Mika Liljeberg, Arifumi Matsumoto,
  Sandy Murphy, Carlos Pignataro, Pasi Sarolahti, Pekka Savola, Pyda
  Srisuresh, Jinmei Tatuya, and Joe Touch for contributing many
  valuable comments on earlier versions of this document.

  The author wishes to thank Secretaria de Extension Universitaria at
  Universidad Tecnologica Nacional and Universidad Tecnologica
  Nacional/Facultad Regional Haedo for their support in this work.

  Finally, the author wishes to express deep and heartfelt gratitude to
  Jorge Oscar Gont and Nelida Garcia for their precious motivation and
  guidance.

8.  Contributors

  Mika Liljeberg was the first to describe how their implementation
  treated soft errors.  Based on that, the solution discussed in
  Section 4.1 was documented in [v6-ON] by Sebastien Roy, Alain Durand,
  and James Paugh.



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9.  References

9.1.  Normative References

  [RFC0792]       Postel, J., "Internet Control Message Protocol",
                  STD 5, RFC 792, September 1981.

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

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

  [RFC1123]       Braden, R., "Requirements for Internet Hosts -
                  Application and Support", STD 3, RFC 1123,
                  October 1989.

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

  [RFC3168]       Ramakrishnan, K., Floyd, S., and D. Black, "The
                  Addition of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to
                  IP", RFC 3168, September 2001.

  [RFC4443]       Conta, A., Deering, S., and M. Gupta, "Internet
                  Control Message Protocol (ICMPv6) for the Internet
                  Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) Specification", RFC 4443,
                  March 2006.

  [RFC4861]       Narten, T., Nordmark, E., Simpson, W., and H.
                  Soliman, "Neighbor Discovery for IP version 6
                  (IPv6)", RFC 4861, September 2007.

9.2.  Informative References

  [Gont]          Gont, F., "On the problem of long delays between
                  connection-establishment attempts in TCP", Work
                  in Progress, January 2009.

  [ICMP-ATTACKS]  Gont, F., "ICMP attacks against TCP", Work
                  in Progress, October 2008.

  [Linux]         The Linux Project, "http://www.kernel.org".

  [RFC0816]       Clark, D., "Fault isolation and recovery", RFC 816,
                  July 1982.





Gont                         Informational                     [Page 12]

RFC 5461             TCP's Reaction to Soft Errors         February 2009


  [RFC4943]       Roy, S., Durand, A., and J. Paugh, "IPv6 Neighbor
                  Discovery On-Link Assumption Considered Harmful",
                  RFC 4943, September 2007.

  [RFC5382]       Guha, S., Biswas, K., Ford, B., Sivakumar, S., and P.
                  Srisuresh, "NAT Behavioral Requirements for TCP",
                  BCP 142, RFC 5382, October 2008.

  [Shneiderman]   Shneiderman, B., "Response Time and Display Rate in
                  Human Performance with Computers", ACM
                  Computing Surveys, 1984.

  [Stevens]       Stevens, W., "TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The
                  Protocols", Addison-Wesley, 1994.

  [Stevens2]      Wright, G. and W. Stevens, "TCP/IP Illustrated,
                  Volume 2: The Implementation", Addison-Wesley, 1994.

  [Thadani]       Thadani, A., "Interactive User Productivity", IBM
                  Systems Journal, No. 1, 1981.

  [Zuquete]       Zuquete, A., "Improving the functionality of SYN
                  cookies", 6th IFIP Communications and Multimedia
                  Security Conference (CMS 2002), 2002.

  [v6-ON]         Roy, S., Durand, A., and J. Paugh, "Issues with Dual
                  Stack IPv6 on by Default", Work in Progress,
                  July 2004.

Author's Address

  Fernando Gont
  Universidad Tecnologica Nacional / Facultad Regional Haedo
  Evaristo Carriego 2644
  Haedo, Provincia de Buenos Aires  1706
  Argentina

  Phone: +54 11 4650 8472
  EMail: [email protected]
  URI:   http://www.gont.com.ar











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