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From: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: TCP Spoofing...
Message-ID: <BOB.91Jan9092902@volitans.MorningStar.Com>
Date: 9 Jan 91 14:29:12 GMT
References: <9101080645.AA05302@uh.msc.umn.edu>
Sender: usenet@MorningStar.COM (USENET Administrator)
Reply-To: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield)
Organization: Morning Star Technologies
Lines: 19
In-Reply-To: tjs@MSC.EDU's message of 8 Jan 91 06:45:58 GMT

In article <9101080645.AA05302@uh.msc.umn.edu> tjs@MSC.EDU (Tim Salo) writes:
   I suspect that discussions of whether the customer should be
   allowed to determine the significance of TCP acknowledgements
   (allow spoofing) or whether only protocol gurus can make this
   decision (disallow spoofing) falls into the realm of religion.  (I
   vote to let the customer decide.)

The customer is welcome to do whatever {s}he likes, and may indeed
invent a very pleasant and workable reliable datastream protocol.
Such a protocol may turn out to be widely liked by the worldwide
networking community, and its inventor lauded as a sage with manifest
vision and wisdom.  It may turn out to be a commercial success,
enabling the inventor to retire in comfort to whatever palm
tree-covered tropical island paradise {s}he might care to purchase.
(Note that this latter seems to be the goal of many religion
inventors.)

But if it can be spoofed (read: doesn't depend upon the sanctity of
end-to-end ACKs), then it's not RFC793 TCP.