Improving protocol standards at IETF 106
17 November 2019
/ protocol-standards
As part of our work on improving protocol standards,
Stephen McQuistin and I are at the
IETF 106 meeting
in Singapore this week. We have an update to our draft on
Describing Protocol Data Units with Augmented Packet Header Diagrams,
and will be joining the hackathon to work on tools for extracting
structured information from protocol specifications.
Our draft recognises that protocol designers in the IETF often make use
of simple block diagrams to describe packet formats. These are easy for
people to read and understand, but inconsistent enough that it's hard
to write tools that can extract and work with the formats. Structured
protocol description languages exist, and are easy for machines to work
with, but are less intuitive for human readers, and so haven't been too
widely adopted in the IETF. We describe some simple conventions for
formatting packet diagrams that make them consistently machine readable.
The intent is to make a minimal change to the way specifications are
written in the IETF, to enable automated processing of the specifications.
In the hackathon, we're working on a prototype tool that can process
drafts containing such packet diagrams, and generate Rust code to
parse the packets. The goal is to showcase the ideas, and demonstrate
proof of concept.
If you're at the IETF in Singapore, come talk to use to learn more:
in the hackathon, after the HotRFC session where Stephen will give
a lightning talk about the project, or later in the week.