Inappropriate TCP Resets Considered Harmful
RFC 3360, “Inappropriate TCP Resets Considered Harmful”, is a Best Current Practice document published in August 2002 by S. Floyd. The canonical text is published by the RFC Editor.
Abstract
This document is being written because there are a number of firewalls in the Internet that inappropriately reset a TCP connection upon receiving certain TCP SYN packets, in particular, packets with flags set in the Reserved field of the TCP header. In this document we argue that this practice is not conformant with TCP standards, and is an inappropriate overloading of the semantics of the TCP reset. We also consider the longer-term consequences of this and similar actions as obstacles to the evolution of the Internet infrastructure.
What “Best Current Practice” means
Documents the IETF community's recommended operational or procedural practice rather than a protocol specification.
The canonical text of RFC 3360 is hosted at rfc-editor.org. Available in TXT,HTML.
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