[EvanAnderson]

> It's probably the worst mistake in TCP/IP.

I vote for TCP/IP lacking a session layer as being the worst mistake. We wouldn't have IP mobility issues if there'd been an explicit session layer to decouple IP from the upper layer protocols.

[mindslight]

That's like the Nethead vs Bellhead argument though, and it's easy to say that with the benefit of several decades of adoption and development.

[EvanAnderson]

I don't necessarily think a session layer protocol is automatically "Bell-headed". It's a natural place to plug-in per-byte billing and that ilk, for sure.

I don't exactly know the timeline between the ITU protocol suite and/or DecNet (both of which have a concept of a session layer protocol) with IPv4. I think they were somewhat contemporaneous. Certainly, the idea of a session layer isn't something that came decades later than IPv4.

Even just a host identifier, in lieu of the IP address of an interface, being used in the TCP tuple would have been so much better than what we have and probably would have been enough of a "session layer". It would be so amazing to have TCP connections that "just work" when clients or servers hop onto different IP networks, use different interfaces, etc.

Edit: It has been mentioned that Vint Cerf regretted the decision to bind the IP into the TCP tuple, too. I don't have an exact quote but I know I've heard him mention it in a talk. Ref: https://argp.github.io/2006/03/05/vint-cerfs-talk/

[mindslight]

> Even just a host identifier, in lieu of the IP address of an interface, being used in the TCP tuple would have been so much better

What are you imagining as the implementation? Is it just in TCP, and IP (/ the network) is unchanged? I can see the benefit of that, but then there still needs to be some mechanism to change the binding of host->IP. And if it's not part of the core network, then it's not straightforward.

There are also other more complex problems not solved by TCP (eg security). I'd rather have a host ID be a pubkey, than some small-namespace ID with a pubkey required on top of that.

It feels like the real problem is the proliferation of different incompatible solutions to any of these problems, which was going to happen even if there was one less problem that needed to be solved.

Another way of looking at it is that TCP got so entrenched because of NAT, and having a session ID within IP instead of (implicitly) within TCP/UDP might have allowed more flexibility with creating new protocols directly on top of IP. But 2+2 more bytes of addressing would have gone a long way too!

[EvanAnderson]

> What are you imagining as the implementation?

I haven't thought about it hard enough to be doing anything besides spouting bullshit. It's one of those lazy "I don't like what we've got but I can't say what we should have" kind of complaints.

The way SCTP handles multi-homing and failover with the verification tag is what I guess I'm thinking of. I'm a little enamored with SCTP, admittedly, and I'd rather we were using it than TCP.

If I were going back in time, without the 20+ years of real-world experience that went into SCTP, I'd propose something simple like having the initiator and receiver each put a (32-bit?) identifier into a couple of session tracking header fields (initiator on SYN, receiver on SYN/ACK). When an endpoint roamed to a new IP address they'd send a zero-byte ACK from the new IP address to the opposing end. The opposing end would provisionally update their IP binding and ACK back to the new IP address. They would continue to send to both IP addresses until they received an ACK from the new IP address, at which point the old IP address would be discarded.

I can already see, doing "improvisational piano" state machine design here, that there are issues with this design. Like I said, spouting bullshit... >smile<

[mindslight]

Ah, I got you. I hear session layer and think something a bit more ingrained in the core network, but I can see how that would work. Relying on a secret 32 bit nonce chaffs me a bit, but there is a similar problem with guessing sequence numbers (modulo source IP spoofing, which has been greatly clamped down on). And there could always have been some extensions adding cryptographic security, timeout the roaming functionality if lots of wrong packets trying to guess session identifiers were received, etc.

Developing on that last bit I threw out, especially since you're lamenting the non-adoption of SCTP. With the retrospective from NAT, it feels like it would have been good to factor out the "port" part of TCP/UDP and put it in the IP header instead ("flow ID" or something). Then define (saddr, daddr, protocol#, flowID) as a "flow tuple" for middle boxes to operate on. TCP/UDP/SCTP could then define and present those bits as port numbers.

This could even be size-negative if you threw out that whole fragmentation thing in favor of completely punting it to a higher layer instead.

(I realize this goes against the end to end principle and strict layer separation, but the fact is that despite the goal, middle boxes are mucking with packets, and when that mechanism cannot be prevented, facilitating it would be better for maintaining flexibility)