Speaking of Standards

In the IETF spirit that gave us RFC 1149 (IP over Avian Carriers) and RFC 3251 (Electricity over IP), Hadriel Kaplan and Bob Penfield brought out today an Internet-Draft titled “Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Version 4.0: P2P2PSIP“. You can guess from the abstract how it is going to go:

This document defines a new and improved version of SIP, which tastes great and is less filling than the previous SIP. This draft updates all previous and future RFCs related to SIP in SIPPING, SIMPLE, MMUSIC, BEHAVE, and so on.

This is admittedly something perhaps only a “standards geek” (like me) would enjoy but the Introduction carries that spirit along:

SIP version 2.0, originally defined in RFC 2543 and updated by RFC
3261 [RFC3261], has become quite popular among the “in” crowd. It
has, however, not been used in a way that people think it should
be used, and has several problems caused by the growth in
complexity of the protocol, ambiguity in usage, lack of security,
and need for backwards compatibility. This draft makes no serious
attempt to fix any of that. Instead, this draft is aimed at
creating a new version of SIP, so that manufacturers can sell new
equipment and software, to help the global economy. This in turn
will increase tax revenue for governments, which eventually may
lead to increased funds for feeding children. Therefore the
ultimate goal of this draft is to feed starving children.

Thus, to accomplish the goal of feeding starving children by
selling new equipment or software, a new SIP version is required
which is not backwards compatible: SIP v4.0.

One may wonder why it isn’t numbered SIP v3.0 - the answer lies in
market research. After the equivalent of hundreds of man-years of
careful research (accomplished in 2 minutes of Google searching),
we have determined that even-numbered versions of protocols have
far greater chance of success than odd-numbered versions. For
example, IPv4, BGP4, SNMPv2, H.323v2, and SIPv2 are all largely
successful, while IPv5, BGP3, SNMPv3, and H.323v3 were not (SIPv3
did not even make it into a draft!). [Note: IPv6 does not count as
purely even-numbered because it is actually 2 times 3, an odd
number, whereas IPv4 is both even and the square of even numbers,
which explains IPv6's relative failure thus far]

Of course, given my interest in security, I enjoyed this part:

This draft mechanism has no security issues, because it is
normatively stated it MUST NOT have any. This is assured by using
an extra “S” in “SIPSS”, and optionally using DTLS, IPSEC, VLANs,
or whatever. From a security perspective, we should note that the
extra “S” makes it either twice as secure as “SIPS”, or at least
plus one. The “S” in “SIPS” from RFC 3261 was infinitely more
secure than just “SIP”, because “SIP” had no trailing “S”; and as
all children know, infinity plus one is bigger than infinity…
thus “SIPSS” is definitely more secure than “SIPS”.

The whole document gave me quite a good laugh, including a number of the “references” that were slipped in among the valid references as well as FIRE and BRIMSTONE and the “poison pills” to avoid tampering by other standards organizations. Some parts of the document will admittedly be better appreciated if you have gone to recent IETF meetings or participated on the mailing lists to understand some of the meanings, but if you are familiar in any way with SIP you will probably find it amusing. Kudos to Hadriel Kaplan and Ben Penfield for a very creative piece of work.

Also today the IETF released RFC 5241, “Naming Rights in IETF Protocols”, offering a new way to fund the ongoing activities of the IETF. The rationale being that if companies will pay millions of dollars to put their names on stadiums, why not pay something to brand parts of protocols?

Happy April 1st to all our readers!

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IETF, sip, standards, aprilfools

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