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AH & IPv4 options




Routers that arbitrarily reorder IP options are broken.  

Bill Simpson "educated" me about this issue offline.  To the best of
my knowledge (including my understanding of Bill's inputs) those
routers never included high-volume vendors (e.g. Cisco, Wellfleet/Bay,
3COM) and the software releases that did reorder options are ancient
by now.  To the best of my understanding, all such routers were
derived in part on a single original TCP/IP stack.  That original
stack has not reordered options for a long while now. I don't think we
can or should make any effort to protect AH from such routers. I don't
think we should change specs just to make older broken systems
conforming.

If the IETF started changing specs to accomodate every broken
implementation that existed, we'd never make any forward progress at
all, IMHO... :-)

Ran
rja@cs.nrl.navy.mil