Jiri Kuthan wrote:

At 17:05 17/12/2006, Kapil Dhawan wrote:

...

I am using RTC/1.2 library and its not generating branch parameter.

too bad, most implementation can deal with it in backw2ards compatibility mode but clients should no longer generate such branch. I would be looking for a more up-to-date stack if I was you.

<evil> Ever used forward() in SER? </evil>

Regards, Martin

Jiri Kuthan wrote:

if (syn_branch ) {
    *msg->add_to_branch_s='0';
    msg->add_to_branch_len=1;
} else {

I don't remember why but I couldn't use the branch=0 thing on one of the proxies I had. But the other way didn't work properly either. A non-2xx ACK got a different branch which caused all sorts of funny things. This was 0.8.14, mind you. Haven't tried the stunt since.

I think I ripped out part of the code from tm and put it in the forward code. Probably should have contributed that patch but it is a bit late now. Different employer...

Regards, Martin

An Essay on Meaning of Branch in ACK

Table of Content ---------------- 0. advance recommendation 1. history 2. semantics 3. bible reading 4. conclusion

0. advance recommendation

No UAS shall be confused by branch=0. If it is, file a bug report against it. It shall match the end-to-end ACKs dialog-wise. Calculating branch for e2e ACKs is pointless in a proxy server, but if a purist is disturbed, turn sync_branch off.

1. history

Back in 2001, there was chaos and strong will to get out of it. Folks were implementing RFC2543 and bombarding RFC authors with nasty questions, particularly when trying to implement it. Most famous one being record-routing named later as strict, however many other were troubling the gentle folks of the IETF. One of those being horrible, horrible transaction matching based on a compound key consisting of five header-fields and all of their parameters. Those were causing interop issues as everyone else was calculating it differently.

I was worried about it too as by that time any attempt to implement lazy parsing failed because of the requirement to calculate transaction key over almost all parts of a SIP message. Parsing, one of the most CPU-expensive parts of the whole server, degraded performance badly. Then being with dynamicsoft, we got together with Rosenberg (jdr) and Sparks (rjs), the latter suggesting having a single-purpose transaction key (as opposed to calculating it in a complicated way). jdr brought it through the IETF in the bis-draft -08, -09 or so and put the "branch cookie" in it.

Badly enough, there is a small nit which was brought in a rush-rush change in the bis-15 (or so?) version shortly before publication of RFC3261. Suggestions for calculating the branch by a stateless proxy include covering via-header field which consequently eliminates the chance to carry out loop detection. (Via will be ALWAYS different even if a request is spiralling heavily.)

2. semantics

Branch ID is there for transaction matching. That means that all requests and replies belonging to the same transaction MUST have the same branch id. The tricky part now is the end-to-end ACK (i.e., ACK sent in response to a positive reply). This type of ACK is a kind of bastardized request in that it seems to form the transaction logic (and has thus the same CSeq) but it not part of the transaction state machine. From the transaction view, it is a standalone stateless request associated with dialog. The transaction machine is just unaware of it and passes it on to dialog processing.

This is best demonstrated by a UAS. A UAS, when receiving the e-2-e ACK MUST NOT look at the transaction id. Do you know why? (apart from the fact that it is not really part of a transaction) ..... Because it is never guaranteed to be the same as of the associated INVITE. The ACK might have taken a completely different path. This is the case when the proxy servers underway were not record-routing. Thus, ACK's branch can always have a different value then INVITE's. Consequently, UASs MUST associate ACKs with its information *dialog-wise*, i.e., by the triple callid, from-tag, to-tag.

In summary, dear reader, transaction matching does not make sense for e2e ACKs and consequently use of branch value in those is meaningless too.

3. bible reading

see Michael's quotations from the Holy Text. annotations:

It is appears that in the literal sense of 8.1.1.7 (and 16.6's reference to it) there is a violation of RFC when the cookie is missing. In a court, one could possibly argue that there is no sense in it (see point 2.) for e-2-e ACKS.

At 20:22 12/02/2007, Michal Matyska wrote:

It takes me ages too. I've to check the RFC due to the fact, that my UAS was rejecting ACK with branch=0 and the result of the digg is, that I'm not sure whether is it correct to use it at all.

If I skip the requirement in 8.1.1.7 Via:

The branch ID inserted by an element compliant with this specification MUST always begin with the characters "z9hG4bK". These 7 characters are used as a magic cookie (7 is deemed sufficient to ensure that an older RFC 2543 implementation would not pick such a value), so that servers receiving the request can determine that the branch ID was constructed in the fashion described by this specification (that is, globally unique). Beyond this requirement, the precise format of the branch token is implementation-defined.

then in 17.2.3 Matching Requests to Server Transactions we can read:

If the branch parameter in the top Via header field is not present, or does not contain the magic cookie, the following procedures are used. These exist to handle backwards compatibility with RFC 2543 compliant implementations.

The INVITE request matches a transaction if the Request-URI, To tag, From tag, Call-ID, CSeq, and top Via header field match those of the INVITE request which created the transaction. In this case, the INVITE is a retransmission of the original one that created the transaction. The ACK request matches a transaction if the Request- URI, From tag, Call-ID, CSeq number (not the method), and top Via

• header field match those of the INVITE request which created the transaction, and the To tag of the ACK matches the To tag of the response sent by the server transaction. Matching is done based on the matching rules defined for each of those header fields. Inclusion of the tag in the To header field in the ACK matching process helps disambiguate ACK for 2xx from ACK for other responses at a proxy, which may have forwarded both responses (This can occur in unusual conditions. Specifically, when a proxy forked a request, and then crashes, the responses may be delivered to another proxy, which might end up forwarding multiple responses upstream). An ACK request that matches an INVITE transaction matched by a previous ACK is considered a retransmission of that previous ACK.

Note the sentence marked by * (hope the formatting will sustain) - if the branch is not present os does not contain the cookie (true for branch=0).... top Via header field match those of the INVITE.... we have branch id which does not start with the cookie - shall we use the branch id for the matching or not? As I understand the text, we use the Via header with the branch id, so it won't ever match the INVITE.

I'm looking forward to your comments. OTOH, setting sync_branch=0 has helped (CVS head version).

Michal

On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 14:41 +0100, Jiri Kuthan wrote:

...

At 16:58 18/12/2006, Martin Hoffmann wrote:

...

Jiri Kuthan wrote:

...

At 17:05 17/12/2006, Kapil Dhawan wrote:

...

I am using RTC/1.2 library and its not generating branch parameter.

too bad, most implementation can deal with it in backw2ards compatibility mode but clients should no longer generate such branch. I would be looking for a more up-to-date stack if I was you.

<evil> Ever used forward() in SER? </evil>

sorry -- it takes me ages to answer. -jiri

forward.c:

/* calculate branch for outbound request;  if syn_branch is turned off,
   calculate is from transaction key, i.e., as an md5 of From/To/CallID/
   CSeq exactly the same way as TM does; good for reboot -- than messages
   belonging to transaction lost due to reboot will still be forwarded
   with the same branch parameter and will be match-able downstream

   if it is turned on, we don't care about reboot; we simply put a simple
   value in there; better for performance
*/
if (syn_branch ) {
    *msg->add_to_branch_s='0';
    msg->add_to_branch_len=1;
} else {

main.c

/* shall use stateful synonym branches? faster but not reboot-safe */ int syn_branch = 1;

-- Jiri Kuthan http://iptel.org/~jiri/

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-- Jiri Kuthan http://iptel.org/~jiri/