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Re: (IPng 5744) Re: [Karen Seo: Thomas Narten -- clarification, etc.]





Ted,

> 
> If this is the case, this simplifies things significantly.  This way, if
> there is an unknown extension header before the AH header, the IPSEC
> host (or security gateway) will have already rejected the packet and
> have sent an ICMP packet back at the sender.  So we don't need to have
> any words about handling unknown extension headers; they will just be
> rejected.  Can someone in the IPNG working group confirm my reading of
> IPV6 spec?
>

Your reading is correct.  The UNH Interoperability Lab folks have had tests
for this case for quite some time.
 
> I'm curious --- was it ever the case that the extension header
> processing worked the way I described them in the first paragraph?  The
> IPV6 expert whom I talked to was pretty definitive that this was the way
> things worked; I was pretty surprised, since I thought it was incredibly
> ugly and unclean, but I wasn't the IPv6 expert.
> 

Given that the ESP header itself does not conform to this rule regarding
extension header structure I don't see how one could require that every
other extension header obey this rule.

I don't recall it ever being stated or implied that there was a required
structure that extension headers had to follow other than they had to have
a next header field somewhere and they needed to be a multiple of eight bytes
in length to preserve alignment.



tim